From April 2021 until January 2025, she was the Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), making her the chief operating officer of a federal agency with 57,000 personnel that invested, during her time there, hundreds of billions of dollars in road, bridge, tunnel, rail, airport, and port projects. She also served for several months during this period as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. Prior to her term as USDOT’s Deputy Secretary, she served for seven years as New York City’s Transportation Commissioner, steering the 5,800-person agency—which operates one of the US’s largest urban transportation systems, with 6,000 miles of roads, nearly 800 bridges, the nation’s largest traffic operation and parking system, the Staten Island Ferry, and extensive bicycle, pedestrian, and public plaza infrastructure—through an era of growth and innovation, as well as the challenges of COVID. She led the City’s Vision Zero initiative, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and data-driven effort to reduce roadway fatalities that was the first of its kind in the US. Between 2009 and 2014, she served first as Assistant Secretary and later Undersecretary of transportation policy in the US Department of Transportation. She previously spent 12 years on Capitol Hill, which was preceded by two years at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Polly Trottenberg has served on numerous boards and commissions, including as a board member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, as chair of the Union Station Development Commission, as co-chair and a member of the Northeast Corridor Commission, and as chair and a member of TRANSCOM, a coalition of 16 transportation-related agencies in the New York metropolitan area.

She received her BA in history from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and her MPP from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.