Maria Ayerdi
A Leader in Public Transportation

“Always knock on those doors because you never know.” Those were the words that Maria Ayerdi recalled her law school professor always saying and when she found herself in need of a job. That was exactly what she explained to her daughter Linda when Ayerdi had to leave at 3 a.m. to meet the Mayor of San Francisco about a job; Ayerdi was going to knock on those doors.

At the time, the San Francisco Mayor was Willie Brown and he had what was known as Open Door Day. The public could stand in line for tickets that would allow them to speak to the Mayor for about 5 minutes. and only 10 to 12 tickets were distributed. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD from the University of California Hastings College of the Law, Ayerdi was hoping the Mayor could help her get a job in the district attorney’s??? office, as a public defender, but she knew those type of jobs weren’t easy to come by.

Still, her need to provide for her daughter while still being able to pick her up from school pushed her to do what most would never think to do, ask the Mayor for a job. After waiting a few hours in line for the doors to open at 7 a.m., Ayerdi was able to get a ticket, her golden ticket.

And while the Mayor was not able to help her get a job as an attorney, he did offer her a job for his office on transportation policy.

“I would have never ever dreamed that it was going to turn into this,” says Ayerdi, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA). I was just trying to get my daughter through school and make sure she got into college.”

Having no previous experience in transportation, she was plunged into a world of politics and government during a time when San Francisco was debating on what to do with its outdated Transbay Terminal originally constructed for the use of rail trains and later turned into a bus terminal. Her work in the Mayor’s office eventually evolved into the Transbay Transit Center Project, a multi-billion dollar project that will create more than just a transit facility. Hailed as the Grand Central Terminal of the West, the Transbay Transit Center will be a state-of-the-art intermodal facility that will connect eight counties in the Bay Area and the state of California through nine transit systems, including the commuter line Caltrain and future high-speed rail. The six-level structure will also feature a 5-acre park on top and a retail concourse. A tower, which will be taller than any other building in San Francisco, will be built adjacent to the center.

“It will be the first modern rail station built in the U.S. in over 50 years,” says Ayerdi. But the project doesn’t stop there. It will also include a redevelopment plan that will create a new neighborhood surrounding the Transit Center. The new neighborhood will have office and retail space and will include 2,600 new homes.

“It’s a quality of life issue,” says Ayerdi who believes this project can be a model for land use and dense planning that can make life easier for people to live and work in the same area.

Renderings of the Transbay Transit Center. Courtesy of Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

As executive director of the TJPA, Ayerdi is at the helm of this massive project. She is responsible for the design, construction and operation of the Transit Center and redevelopment plan. She reports to a five-member board of directors while also managing all the day-to-day operations of the TJPA including fundraising for the project on the state, local and federal level. “Maria’s dogged and creative leadership on this complex project is helping to build San Francisco’s 21st century transportation infrastructure and a new neighborhood at the same time,” says Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., Chair of the TJPA Board of Directors and executive director and CEO of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Nila Gonzales, TJPA Board Secretary and Office Manager, has been working with Ayerdi for about five years and describes her as an exceptional and inspirational boss. “She’s very inclusive,” says Gonzales, “She really brings to the best in the people and enjoys watching people do better. I truly believe I am a better person because I began working with her five years ago, she wants us to know there is always room to grow and she encourages that.” Though Ayerdi has been named one of the most influential women in public service in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times for the past four years, her journey hasn’t been easy.

One of the few Latinas to hold an executive position in public transportation, she has had to prove herself continuously both personally and professionally.

Having gotten pregnant at 18, Ayerdi became the first generation in her family to attend college. She managed to put herself through undergraduate and law school graduating with high honors. Her tenacity not only came from wanting to be a role model for her five younger siblings and daughter, but also from the education that was instilled in her by her parents.

“The importance of school and doing the very best you could at everything you were doing whether it was a part-time job at a grocery store, a student in class, [growing up] there was always an emphasis on doing the very best you could and going above and beyond what people told you was possible,” she says. Now, at age 43, Ayerdi continues to prove she can overcome challenges and misconceptions. As a champion of the Transit Center, through the years she was sometimes doubted on her abilities to pull of such a complex project because of either her gender or youthful appearance. “It’s almost like I have to work twice as hard as somebody else who may not look like me or who’s a male or who’s not a minority,” she says. “I’ve had to work three, four times harder to prove myself.” But she has been able to prove those doubters wrong with every milestone she has reached with this project since her days in the office of the former Mayor Willie Brown, including the groundbreaking of the temporary bus terminal that will allow for the construction of the new Transit Center scheduled to begin in 2010. “The core competencies you need to have for a project like this is perseverance, the ability to strategize and work with people from all shades and walks of life and bring people together and not give up, especially on a project like this,” she says.

Maria Ayerdi and the TJPA Staff

It was perhaps her initial inexperience in transportation and in the public sector that helped her see past the politics. Ayerdi says it made it easier for her to push through and move forward with a vision that she strongly believed in and convinced others to believe in, too.

Transbay Transit Center City Park/TJPA

“Whenever I would talk to people about it, they would say, ‘Oh, that’s never going to happen,’” says Ayerdi. “I had to show people what the vision was and talk about it over the years in order to raise over $2 billion that we now have for the project.” But it’s Ayerdi’s personal experiences that are the drive behind her passion and motivation for this project. Growing up, her family’s primary mode of transportation was public transit. She remembers what it was like watching her mother take multiple buses to get the kids to school or to go to the supermarket or what it was like having to haul the laundry to the laundromat on the bus. “If the public chooses to take public transportation, it should be safe, it should be clean, it should be efficient and it should get them from point A to point B in a seamless, easy manner,” she says. “We can do better in terms of offering options.” Though there are still several years before the Transbay Transit Center Project is completed Ayerdi is helping to set the bar for future public transportation in the U.S. while also helping to create more than 28,000 jobs with this project that is expected to serve up to 45 million passengers a year while encouraging a much wider use of public transit.

“I feel a sense of great pride in being in this position because I think its something that makes the community proud and it shows other young Latinas what is possible,” says Ayerdi. After all, all it takes is a little door knocking.

By Alondra Hernandez