Rail Transit Sessions Speaker:
Biography
Biography: Ben Holland is Manager of Vehicle Systems Engineering for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. With a dedicated staff of 17 engineers Ben's group defines and controls the materials and procedures used to maintain the revenue fleet in the primary and secondary shops; for developing and issuing vehicle modifications to improve fleet reliability, availability, maintainability and safety; for evaluating new products and designs to address obsolescence and cost; for investigating incidents, finding root cause and implementing appropriate remedies; and for providing engineering support (hard learned lessons) to the new vehicle procurement project.
Ben has 25 years of experience in transit beginning at Gillig Corporation as a mechanical design engineer and later as a sales engineer responsible for development of a major vehicle procurement, and then to the San Francisco Municipal Railway as a Senior Engineer responsible for several high profile vehicle procurements, and then to BART as Manager of Vehicle Systems Engineering for the last 13 years. During this time, BART ridership has doubled to nearly 430,000 riders, while the revenue fleet MTBSD has nearly quadrupled to over 4,000 hours.
Ben has a BSME from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA, and is a registered Professional Engineer in California.