Pioneering GIS Excellence at LA Metro

Some of the world’s best discoveries have been accidents; sticky notes, penicillin, the chocolate chip cookie. For Anika-Aduesa Smart, one of her best professional discoveries was an accident as well, one that she built into an impressive career in geographic information systems (GIS). Smart, currently the director of GIS for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), grew up passionate about mathematics, statistics, geography, science, and visual design. These educational interests were supported by schoolteachers and university professors who encouraged her to think about the empirical relationship between humans and their environment through a data-informed lens. Yet it wasn’t until a chance assignment in 2004 that Smart officially embarked on her journey — a moment that she describes as GIS choosing her, rather than her choosing GIS.

“I embraced GIS quite by accident one day. I had one of my colleagues come to me and ask if I knew anything about GIS, and I said no, I have no idea what that is,” she recalled, “He said, ‘that’s great, you’re going to start the first GIS team’ so I had to figure out what it was!” Since that fateful moment, Smart has employed GIS to do everything from establishing a Special Task Force for national security to mapping vehicular accident trends to helping solve a murder. Continue reading to see how she’s developed an impressive culture of GIS in LA Metro and what advice she has for other GIS units.

Innovation at Metro

LA Metro is one of the biggest urban transportation networks in the United States, with 284,905,030 million bus and train boardings in 2023. Smart, who first joined Metro in 2015 as a budget analyst, has pioneered several GIS projects around equity and safety. As LA Metro is responsible for the safe and equitable treatment of both riders and employees, Smart has helped tackle both of these areas with innovative GIS tools. One internal use involved work done for Metro’s Human Resources Department. An HR employee, interested in changing the approach to evaluating operator accidents, came to Smart with an idea on how to better understand accidents and the relationship to hazards in the operating environment. Smart’s team helped HR take their concept from idea to execution, by working with multiple datasets like accident locations and environmental hazards to visualize why certain areas might have had a disproportionate number of accidents. After analyzing the maps and finding patterns, LA Metro’s HR team could more easily distinguish operator error from no fault accidents. This created an opportunity for Metro to make changes in the physical environment that enhanced safety for drivers and passengers, like adding stop signs or moving infrastructure.

The external Equity Information Hub, built by the GIS and Equity teams in 2023, took Metro’s Equity Platform to a new level with databases, maps, and tools that can be used to conduct equity assessments and understand resource allocation. This is also where the public can explore Metro’s Equity Focus Communities (EFCs). A community is designated an EFC if there are “high concentrations of residents and households associated with mobility barriers” like low-income households (earning less than $60,000 per year), Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) populations, or households without cars. This helps Metro identify the greatest transportation needs. The Hub also incorporates engagement resources for community-based organizations and Metro employees.

The most comprehensive GIS project is the OneMetro Analytics Platform (One/MAP). According to Smart, the philosophy behind OneMAP is "good data, better technology, best practices." Built on the ArcGIS platform, OneMap emphasizes integration of GIS data and workflows with non-geospatial ones to promote more effective collaboration, decision-making, and stewardship among Metro employees. Smart described the environment before integrating data into one platform as siloed and non-uniform, which meant that employees couldn’t effectively collaborate or make the best decisions. Without good data collection and analysis in a standardized way, agency officials were less efficient  in making the best decisions for the transit-riding public. By collecting the information and bringing it back to a central place, employees have shared access to the trends and patterns that emerge, and are able to see relationships that they previously could not see as easily. Smart’s team specifically designed OneMap to “provide a space for users from all business departments and at all levels of expertise, to access the data and tools necessary to help support their business objectives.”

Looking ahead, Smart said she is “laser focused on maturing GIS at the agency and maturing the way in which we do analytics.” She also wants to continue enhancing spatial literacy and grounding geospatial competence within Metro, with a focus on the ethical use of data and analytics.

Strategies and Lessons Learned

Smart provided the following recommendations based on her experience developing and leading GIS teams in local government.

Engage Various Departments:

At LA Metro Smart worked to dispel the notion that engaging with GIS required extensive expertise. “Everyone thought you had to be an expert,” said Smart, “which we needed to disprove.” She encouraged exploration through tools like ArcGIS Online, which has a lower barrier to entry and provides colleagues across Metro a low-stakes opportunity to get comfortable with using GIS in their department. Engaging across the enterprise produced a great success resulting in a significant ArcGIS Online increase from only a few Metro ArcGIS users to over 400. Smart reported broad increases in login rates, employee upskilling, and independent tool creation.

Support Spatial Literacy:

Smart applied the ADKAR model (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement) to assess staff in their spatial literacy progress. Even within the GIS department, because employees possessed a wide variety of mapping skills, she recognized the need to address and engage each user, helping them along the first few stages until they could begin to help themselves. LA Metro now has a geospatial intelligence hub, and employees can attend classes and seminars on GIS, some of which are hosted by her team.

Tailor Communication:

Literacy required speaking stakeholders' language, demonstrating relevance through examples, and addressing their specific concerns. In addition to engaging across departments, Smart rebranded GIS as business intelligence in order to properly capture the power of the tools to everyday action. Comprehensive engagement included presentations, one-on-one meetings, and Q&A sessions to highlight potential impact.

Promote People-Centric Technology:

“People first, always first” is how Smart approaches tech adoption. One of the most important lessons her team learned was not to deliver the platform first, but rather start with the people and build the technology from there. “GIS is about the people,” she said, “solving challenges without people at the core is a common mistake of IT departments.”

The Metro GIS story firmly demonstrates the power of distributing access to technology tools, especially those that support collaboration.  This distributive approach requires a blend of passion, strategic vision, and practical implementation, which when combined with cultural changes and broad literacy training can lead to daily breakthroughs.

Want to learn more?

Listen to Smart's episode of the Data-Smart City Pod.