Prue Oswin

In her own words

I think my values were shaped growing up on a farm in Swan Hill spending lots of time in nature. I was also very proud of my grandparents, who were doing conservation work at Phillip Island. I wanted to work in a field that improved how we interacted with nature, and environmental engineering was where I ended up.  I started my career in the water industry because it was useful work, that aligned with my values.

My interest in active transport emerged when I moved to the city to attend university. I would walk, cycle and rollerblade everywhere, as did many of my friends and I remember sitting around in the pub talking about it. When I found myself doing my work in water I was thinking: ‘you know, we could put a bike way along with the sewer here’. I liked thinking about how people moved around their city. More than that, I knew how I wanted to move around my city, and it troubled me that this network of noisy, scary roads didn’t accommodate my joyous and sustainable travel habits. When I relocated to Queensland and got involved in Ironman triathlon events, I discovered a whole new world of cycling.

I made a sideway shift into active transport bringing my engineering experience in planning, project management and processes as well as my years of lived experiences, particularly the intuitive knowledge you get from thousands of hours riding a bike. The real-life knowledge is compelling because the safety elements are happening in real time and you have a backlog of having processed a raft of risk in in your personal experiences. It is an important component of my skillset but probably the least recognised. I have never been in a crash, which is quite remarkable given how much I have riden exclusive of mountain biking where you fall off into the dirt all the time.

In active transport we need to be deeply involved at the community level to really understand problems and how people feel about their safety and access to facilities. My current role is extremely diverse and includes reviewing and developing guidance for active transport, training, and on the ground work for local governments planning neighbourhood infrastructure. I do quite a lot of work with schools, and it is a really important area for active transport especially in regional towns where you often don’t have the cycling commuter culture to build upon. What you do have is a strong interest in kids being able to walk and ride to school and often we have infrastructure that’s a real barrier to that happening.

I think some of my most exciting work at the moment is surveying parents, understanding where our infrastructure is failing to meet their needs and their standards of safety, and planning projects to address their requirements. When I first started asking parents what was needed to improve infrastructure, their responses were really clear and there was a lot of consensus in the local community about what sort of crossings were needed and where. Sometimes as practitioners we might think we are tackling a big, wicked problem, but the solution is a lot simpler than we think when we engage with the community and actually ask them what they want.

I am Chair of the Engineers Australia’s Women in Transport working group and we advocate for engineering and planning to more effectively meet women’s needs and achieve better community outcomes. This includes providing night-time safety and increasing the mobility and safety of carers and particularly children. Women are doing the lion share of the kids’ pickup and drop offs and there are easy fixes we can make in our infrastructure if we ask the right people when gathering our data. Gender issues are especially large in active transport.

Valuing your passions

From my personal experience if you can identify your personal values early on and use those to guide yourself though out your career will never feel like your job is just work and you will be able to contribute to society in a way that is highly meaningful to you. It’s about focusing on your big interest areas and passions. We are seeing a blur between work and personal life now and I think that is good because you are never looking for motivation if you are engaged and interested in in your work and projects.  Initially I went into the water industry where other people thought I was useful before I realised active transport was my true passion. The longer you leave the transition the harder it is, and I feel very fortunate that I was able to make that move early in my career.

When I speak at women in engineering events a frequent issue raised is trying to work out transitions pre and post children, with a goal to keep careers on track in a way that accommodates their family needs. After I had children, I didn’t go back to work for a big organisation. Instead, I joined a small group and then launched my own company to create the flexibility I needed, so I am a little bit outside the system. But my advice for organisations and agencies is to look at the flexibility being provided to members of their workforce, and in particular where you are asking people to work.

Something I found very interesting was that I didn’t want to be physically a long distance away from my kids when they were young. I had been quite critical of my own judgement around this and thought it was particular to my approach to risk. It was only when I did school surveys and interviewed parents that I learnt many women shared this concern and it shaped what jobs they would take on. It is important to validate the experiences of women and feed this information into agencies so they can do better.

The power of lived experiences

I was working on a project around conflicts between path users (walkers and cyclists) and developing a technical guideline and the room of people I was consulting with was all men, apart from two women. I asked ‘is this a safety concern for you’ and the two women and one man immediately shot up their hands. The women said: ‘yes we are worried about vehicles reversing out of driveways hitting people using the path’ and the man who put up his hand said: ‘if you are not concerned about this, you should be because I work in road safety statistics and these crashes are increasing.’ When I spoke to both the women afterwards, they had experience caring for children and that’s why they were extremely alert to the issue. I had the same experience with my kids on bikes constantly reminding them to: ‘watch the driveways’.  It really hit home that the experiences of carers are so valuable in our work in transport. When women have children and come back into the workforce they should be welcomed with: ‘hey, great you are back and you are upskilled and have new knowledge and experiences we really need in our industry and we are grateful for that!’