A love for the Chicago Cubs may have indirectly led to Monica Tibbits-Nutt becoming Massachusetts’ top transportation official.
As a child, Tibbits-Nutt and her Cubs-loving family lived in the 300-person town of Topeka, Indiana. To get to Wrigley Field, they rode the South Shore Line, an electric interurban railway built in the 1900s.
“That was the first train I'd ever been on, and it was the only train I was on until I moved here [to Massachusetts],” Tibbits-Nutt said. It was the start of a lifelong fascination with that transportation mode.
Today, Tibbits-Nutt is the Massachusetts secretary of transportation and CEO of the commonwealth’s Department of Transportation. Smart Cities Dive sat down with her at the MassDOT headquarters in Boston to learn about her journey.
Meeting high expectations
Tibbits-Nutt is the oldest of four children in what she calls a working-class family. Her parents did not go to college; they worked in manufacturing jobs, but they wanted something better for their children: “Their big thing was study, study, study — you do not want to be like us,” Tibbits-Nutt said. She graduated from the University of Southern Indiana, then she obtained a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the Ohio State University School of Architecture in 2007.
In the years leading up to the 2008 housing crisis, Tibbits-Nutt worked for the Columbus, Ohio, planning and development office. “It was an important time, but a horrible time,” she remembered. The city’s decades-old bus routes no longer served the neighborhoods where people had moved. “That was really the first time that I'm [thinking], housing has a transportation problem,” she said.
Central Ohio Transit Authority then redesigned and expanded its bus network. “Just changing those timetables, just changing those routes, unlocked entire neighborhoods of the city,” Tibbits-Nutt recalled.
Tibbits-Nutt’s first transportation role was working for the MBTA advisory board. “That was the best job to try and understand and learn planning, and especially transportation planning,” she said.
Paul Regan, executive director of the advisory board since 1998, became her mentor. At his suggestion, Tibbits-Nutt spent three years surveying riders and digging into the MBTA’s budget. “It was the absolute best education I could get for doing this work,” she said.
Her work led her to a high-profile position on the MBTA’s Fiscal Management and Control Board, an oversight group formed by then-Gov. Charlie Baker in response to the authority’s operational and management failures. Tibbits-Nutt was vice chair of the FMCB from 2019 until it stopped its work in 2021.
While Tibbits-Nutt was on the board of trustees of TransitCenter, a foundation supporting public transit, Maura Healey, then attorney general of Massachusetts, asked for her help. Healey was considering a run for governor, and she wanted Tibbits-Nutt to educate her about the commonwealth’s transportation issues. When Healey was elected governor in 2022, she asked Tibbits-Nutt first to join her transition team, then to serve as undersecretary of transportation. In November 2023, Tibbits-Nutt became transportation secretary and MassDOT CEO.
The task ahead
Tibbits-Nutt is in charge of the commonwealth’s highways, freight and passenger rail programs, 35 state-owned general aviation airports, the registry of motor vehicles and the MBTA.
It’s not an easy task. “Our infrastructure is old, and a lot of it is very antiquated,” she said. Among her biggest challenges, she names roadway projects, making the transit system accessible for those with disabilities and filling “transit deserts” where bus or rail service is minimal or absent.
To tackle those issues, she likes to put boots on the ground, including her own. She initiated what she calls “district days” when she and her leadership team visit one of the six highway districts, review any projects in the area, visit the regional transit authorities and meet with local residents. “It gives us an opportunity to engage with people face to face. [Those meetings] have probably been the most successful things we've done, and have helped so many of our projects and policies,” Tibbits-Nutt said.
And she considers it a benefit of the job. “I love meeting people, getting to sit down and actually hear what's going on and being able to talk about the things that can actually address their issues. It's fantastic!” she said.
With the support of Gov. Healey and the state legislature, MassDOT is looking at options for operating an east-west passenger rail service across the commonwealth. Tibbits-Nutt said she would also like to improve bus service to the communities in central and western Massachusetts and to better connect areas and communities across the state. “It really is about opening up those opportunities for people to go work at places, go to schools that they otherwise wouldn't be able to,” she said.
Tibbits-Nutt still loves trains, draws maps for fun and enjoys building Erector Sets with her daughter on weekends. She calls her role a dream job: “It is an opportunity to take all the weird stuff I've learned and all the amazing deep dives I've done, and put it all in one job.”
