My name is Nathaniel Horadam – Native Texan, Vandy alum (BA ’11), former Accenture management consultant, transportation planner (Georgia Tech, MCRP ’18), and shameless Atlanta booster. These days, I’m a managing consultant and automated vehicle specialist at the Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) in Atlanta.
In early 2015, after three years of working on exclusively federal IT projects, I’d started to recognize the increasingly important role cities were playing in driving societal change. Automated vehicles had captured my imagination, and I saw cities as the primary facilitators of their deployment (this seems less likely today). At the time, I was performing a variety of supply chain and project management functions on a federal cloud architecture program, and I’d seen first-hand the challenges of scaling infrastructure where the failure tolerance was effectively zero. I guessed whoever ended up operating AV fleets would severely underestimate the challenges and costs associated with redundancies and cybersecurity.
So I decided to study cities and urban transportation systems to better understand the demand side of automated vehicle deployments. And because I’d already fallen in love with Atlanta, I chose to do it here, at Georgia Tech. I moved well beyond network architecture, and spent most of my time in graduate school researching deployment models and challenges – physical, digital or regulatory – that AVs will need to overcome to scale successfully.
My work at CTE still focuses heavily on automation, specifically for transit buses, but also broadly supports CTE’s mission to develop and commercialize zero-emission technologies throughout the transportation sector.
All views expressed here are solely my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Nathaniel Horadam 