As a former TV weatherman, Jay Faught is used to predicting change.
Now he's the one making change as Los Alamos National Laboratory’s first-ever transportation director.
It's a job that has him plotting new bus routes, managing parking lots and looking for ways to make the whole system more efficient. It has brought him full circle from a childhood filled with imaginary city planning.
Growing up, Jay and his older sister Rhonda would spend hours designing intricate maps of make-believe cities on posterboard. They carefully crafted roadways, intersections and even bus stops, which Jay would "drive" his Matchbox cars across.
"We'd draw roads, set up little traffic lights, and I'd imagine driving through the cities we built," Jay recalls with a smile.
He also used to beg his mom to take a job as a school bus driver so he could open the alluring bifold door for people — but to no avail.
"I don’t know why, but I thought that would be so, so cool," Jay says.
His passion for transportation was evident from a young age, and it continued to grow alongside his sister's ambitions. Rhonda pursued civil engineering and eventually became New Mexico's secretary of transportation. Jay, meanwhile, began working at the Ohio Department of Transportation during college and continued there after graduating, developing a deep understanding of the complexities of transportation systems.
Today, Jay faces one of his biggest challenges yet — managing the transportation needs tied to the Lab's expanding mission. It's a task that, like forecasting weather, requires a mix of data analysis, foresight and creative problem-solving.
A short detour
Jay's career in transportation didn’t come without a detour. For three years he worked as a TV weatherman, including for Albuquerque TV news station KRQE.
In addition to being enamored with cars and buses during his childhood, Jay grew up watching every one of his town's nightly TV newscasts to compare weather reports. As a teenager, he turned his family basement into a veritable weather center with different maps and dry-erase boards to track precipitation and temperature trends.
"My friends thought I was crazy when they would come over and I would show them my weather center," he says.
A few years after leaving Bowling Green State University with a journalism degree and minor in meteorology, and after leaving ODOT, Jay began working as a TV meteorologist in Lima, Ohio. He spent several years documenting the literal highs and lows of the community an hour north of Dayton. He remembers with pride the winter he correctly predicted a major Christmas storm — one not forecast by the National Weather Service or the other local TV channels. There was also the time he convinced the news director to break into regular programming to warn viewers about what turned into a deadly tornado — a first for a station that hadn't previously made such a cut in programming.
Even 20 years after working in Lima, he still gets the occasional piece of fan mail.
Shifting gears
Jay left Ohio in 2003 and moved back to New Mexico, where he was born and had lived until his mother died when he was 13.
While occasionally filling in for the meteorologists at KRQE, Jay also took a job with the city of Albuquerque's Transit Department — or ABQ RIDE — leading the transportation demand management (TDM) program. That meant encouraging residents to ride the city buses or use other forms of alternative transportation, such as bicycles and carpooling.
That led to a similar job at the Mid-Region Council of Governments, which runs the New Mexico Rail Runner and, eventually, to Southern California. Then, in 2016, Jay joined the San Diego Association of Governments as the TDM program manager, where he led a small staff that worked with more than 200 employers to implement alternative transportation programs in the workplace. While there, he also worked on bike and transit projects, receiving an award for growing first-time transit ridership by 67%.
But family came calling in 2022. His sister, Kim, who had raised him after his mother's death, decided to move to Santa Fe, where their sister Rhonda also was living. "I was kind of jealous of my two sisters being together, and I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be close to family again," Jay says.
He assumed it was impossible from a career perspective. What were the odds he could find a job in his chosen field?
"I told my sisters it had to be the right job for me to move, and I swear it was about two days later I saw the posting for a transportation director at Los Alamos National Laboratory," he says. "I was like, 'Oh my gosh. It was as if this job ad was written just for me.'"
The right man for the job
Monica Witt, who oversees the Lab’s transportation program as the Utilities and Infrastructure facilities operations director, says she recognized immediately that Jay had the skills and vision to stand up a new Lab transportation program.
"When I interviewed Jay, I knew he was the right person to tackle such an immense job," she says. "Changing the way we commute to work is no easy feat, but Jay is resilient and tenacious and understands that what he does is key to supporting our mission."
Since arriving in summer 2022, Jay has built a small Parking and Transportation Services (PATS) team and launched a series of new programs.
The ultimate goal is to reduce the number of single-occupant-vehicle commuters, thus reducing traffic congestion and saving parking spaces. Mission growth has meant more employees and more facilities — sometimes built on top of what had been parking lots — at a geographically constrained site. While the Lab plans to add some new parking in the coming years, including a garage in TA-48, it will still end up 2,000 to 3,000 spaces short, Jay says.
PATS launched an express bus program in 2023 that offers employees free rides directly to two locations along the Pajarito corridor from Pojoaque Pueblo and San Felipe Pueblo. By running a combined six buses, the program has essentially added 300 remote parking spots for Lab employees.
"We're working with our partners to have remote parking lots off campus because we just don't have the space or the time to build new parking on campus," he says, noting that Lab leadership decided before his hiring that it would focus on alternative transportation rather than adding significantly more parking.
The Lab had never before bused employees to work from off-site lots, and starting the new service required coordination across many different areas, like security, contracting and legal. It also involved planning around the most common work schedules, trying to avoid duplicating existing transit services — like the New Mexico Park and Ride buses that come to the Lab — and knowing the Lab couldn't possibly offer a bus schedule that worked for every single employee.
That's why PATS now incentivizes other alternative commutes, such as a program to offer preferred parking to carpools with at least three employees.
Finding alternative transportation, enhancing safety
Genna Waldvogel, who works alongside Jay as the Lab’s traffic and open space operations manager, says his collaborative spirit is instrumental in the transportation program's successes.
"Jay routinely brings people together to find solutions and always considers others' input as he makes decisions," she says.
"Changing the way we commute to work is no easy feat, but Jay is resilient and tenacious and understands that what he does is key to supporting our mission," says Monica.
PATS has worked closely with Logistics' Heavy Equipment Roads and Grounds group to make it easier for employees to not drive to work — mainly by bolstering on-site shuttle service with enhanced routes and greater shuttle frequency. Jay says that has required more vehicles than the Lab could obtain, so PATS helped get shuttles via short-term rentals.
"This group has grown significantly over the last few years, and it is their work and dedication that Lab staff see most often," Jay says.
Jay's team also manages the Lab's parking lots and has brought in new enforcement officers to maintain safety and order. The goal, he says, is not to increase the number of parking citations but rather to change behavior and create a safe and fair environment for all employees.
See you on the bus
It's easy for Jay to sell the idea of alternative transportation to everyone he meets at the Lab — he walks the talk as a regular bus commuter.
"I don't think I'd be doing my job if I wasn't a bus rider," he says.
He is a familiar face on the New Mexico Park and Ride bus, in particular, which he catches at a stop near his home in Santa Fe.
In fact, Jay much prefers the bus to driving his own car. Even when he lived in San Diego, he and his husband, Nick, owned a single vehicle between them, so Jay either walked to work or rode the light rail. A bus commute gives him a chance to check work emails and get a jump on his day. In the afternoon, he relaxes and enjoys some "me time" by watching Netflix on his phone. In Northern New Mexico, the bus also provides Jay the added benefit of not having to drive himself in inclement weather.
Public transportation provides a better lifestyle for Jay, and he believes the same can be true for other Lab employees, too.
"PATS is a young group at the Lab, but it's really exciting to look at the future and know you can make a difference in people's lives with services to help make their commutes better," he says.
As a bonus during his commutes, Jay has a good idea of how the weather will affect his course. His past as a meteorologist still plays a big part in his life.
He spends his weekends — and sometimes even his waking nights — charting heat waves and cold fronts, calculating cloud coverage and trying to predict if an incoming thunderstorm will be isolated or scattered.
He mostly forecasts for his own amusement, posting his predictions to a personal weather website that he doesn't promote, though he sometimes will lend his expertise to friends planning outdoor events or who want to know what clothes to pack for their next vacation.
"I honestly wake up in the middle of the night when there's a big winter storm," Jay says. "I have to check the radar, because I want to know if it's snowing and if my forecast was accurate."
LA-UR-24-31236