Emily Gates began her public transit career at Motivate (now Lyft), working first as a hardware product manager and then as the general manager (GM) of Boston’s Hubway bikeshare network, where she oversaw an 11% year-over-year increase in membership, a 9% increase in rides and deployed 30 new stations, increasing the system size by 20% overall to 185 stations. When she started at Hubway, Gates inherited a major financial challenge from her predecessor, unhappy riders who couldn’t get in touch with Hubway when they had a problem and labor issues with the union. During her tenure at Hubway, she reviewed and processed every invoice from the prior year and set up procedures to ensure they wouldn’t fall behind again; hired an on-site staff member to manage rider concerns; and immediately established a regular working committee to capture employee feedback, leading to a record-breaking zero grievances filed during her tenure.  

She wanted to take the learnings of her time as GM and apply them to all of Motivate’s 11 systems, so she proposed and built a new operations strategy department. She took responsibility for all data collection, analytics and reporting staff, operations and maintenance tools and processes, rebalancing software management and technical writing staff and created her first “get [stuff] done team.” She also moved customer service operations in-house across all Motivate bikeshare systems, created the fraud department, and designed and deployed a new web-based self-help system based on Zendesk.    

Over the past seven years at Transit app, Gates has represented the interests of major transit agency partners within the Transit development ecosystem, from developing a specification for representing crowding during the pandemic, to designing a real-time arrival prediction accuracy report since used by over 50 transit agencies to improve their customer experience. Her service delivery team at Transit app currently serves over nine million active app users and more than 180 transit agency clients across six countries, including TransLink in Vancouver, B.C., the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) in Toronto, Ontario, and the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Austin, Texas. Since early 2022, Gates has held the title of head of service delivery at Transit app. She product managed the release of Transit app’s web trip planner released in summer 2025, which is now the official trip planner available on 10-plus transit agency websites, including the TTC’s.  

She has led the company’s participation in 11 Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grant applications (winning six of them) for emerging technologies alongside transit agency partners. One such grant opportunity resulted in the adoption of a new GTFS specification—GTFS-Flex—and the beginning of Transit app’s support of deviated fixed route and call-ahead rural agencies.  

Gates has played a key role throughout the development and go-to-market processes for numerous products such as automatically detected detours, Rate-My-Ride and account-based mobile ticketing, ranging from product discovery with transit agencies, to internal coordination between design and technical teams, to marketing and launching services across the 1,000-plus agencies where Transit app provides trip planning.  

Over 20 individuals who continue to work in public transportation and mobility gained their first career experience with Gates as their manager. She has served as a panelist or moderator for presentations and panels at over 25 webinars and conferences hosted by organizations like the American Public Transportation Association, the World Bank UITP and the Transportation Research Board (TRB). She has reviewed dozens of academic papers for TRB and participated in multiple committees. Outside of work, she volunteers organizing supplies, cleaning pantries and fridges, buying and transporting food for the South Philadelphia Community Fridge. She’s also an active member of the city of Philadelphia’s urbanist advocacy organization 5th Square Advocacy, writing letters to state representatives advocating for increased Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority funding.    

Is there a specific experience that led you to where you are today? 

I began my career with an unbearable series of traffic-clogged miserable highway car commutes in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia and determined that I could happily spend the rest of my career helping society get where they want to go better. I haven't owned a car in 13 years (across four different cities), which has allowed me the freedom to think differently about how we move. 

What do you enjoy most about your job? 

I love taking on seemingly insurmountable challenges and turning them into concrete actions that establish the foundation for solving them. I love hearing about a problem I've never encountered and figuring out how to set up structures and processes to fix the issue using whatever tools we have around. I suppose that's how I ended up with two engineering degrees. 

What’s the most challenging part of your job? 

There aren't enough hours in the day (or the week, or the year) for all the stuff I want to do. Also, sometimes the way forward requires accepting compromises I don't want to make, which is a big challenge. 

What is the accomplishment you’re most proud of and why? 

Several times in my career, I have taken on teams and departments that weren't cohesive, often including players who were underutilized and underappreciated. I put in place systems that helped them thrive, and they went on to do great things as a team and in their careers. It's very satisfying to help others grow in their careers while improving the way an organization works. 

What is an accomplishment you would like to work towards in your career? 

I think it would be really rewarding to participate in a big physical project and see it through to the point of a ribbon cutting with a balloon arch. I was in hardware for a few years, and while it was challenging, I realized how wonderful it can be to point to something in the world and say, "I did that." 

What is your best advice you can share from your area of expertise? 

Always listen intently and completely to the people closest to the problem. Often, they have the best ideas for how to fix it; they just need a different set of words and someone to advocate passionately on their behalf. Also, contribute to the solutions, not the problems.