Margarita Gagliardi's Story

Margarita Gagliardi was seven years old when she arrived in Miami, FL, a Cuban refugee, "with one suitcase for three people, no money, housing, nothing*." Her mother was able to obtain passports to leave the country from the Swiss Embassy in Havana so that her children could grow up with the “freedom of speech, religion, and the ability to determine our life and professional course." Today, you can ask her to sum up her professional approach in one statement and she has a ready answer: "Nothing is impossible." It is an attitude she adopted from her mother, who, "literally worked like mad to create a home for us here, educate us, and instill in us what I consider a noble sense of purpose, ethics, and integrity.”

At the age of 14, Margarita knew that she wanted to be a transit planner. "There were no school buses in Greater Miami so I had to deal with a number of bus transfers and challenges just to get to school," she says. "It was an incredibly arduous process and so it got me thinking in terms of geography and mobility and how to better serve people and their travel needs."

A graduate of Indiana University with degrees in geography and planning, Margarita assumed her first national-level role as a transportation planner, supervising and managing planning programs in 10 cities for the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration). This experience would prove critical while working on some of the most significant transit projects in the US, such as the East Side Access, bringing Long Island Rail Road customers to midtown in New York City, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, and the capital program for Metro-North Railroad in New York. "I have seen what worked and what hasn't worked so well during my 35-year career, and try to tweak those things so that our clients get the benefit of that experience. I am a strong proponent of carefully planning a project’s execution, and really understanding what our clients expect of us."

Margarita and Urban Engineers (Urban) first crossed paths during the preparation of the Major Investment Study and Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Schuylkill Valley Metro, a new transportation system that would operate along a 60-mile corridor from Philadelphia to Reading, PA. "This project provided a window into the Urban organization," she said. "What I took away from that was that Urban is a can-do organization not only in the sense that it can provide its external clients any kind of service they need, but also in the way that it develops a sense of community among its internal clients."

Regarding her new role as Urban's Vice President of Transit Planning, "one person can lead but you cannot effectuate change unless you have a team behind you. I have been senior vice president of a company and at the same time, a worker bee on some projects - you just need to be flexible and do what is best for the team," she said. "I saw it during the Schuylkill Valley Metro Project as an outsider and I am seeing it again now - the company is behind its employees 100%."

*The Gagliardi family's immigration to the US is chronicled in "The Cuban-American Family Album," by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.