Chris Zeilinger is Assistant Director at the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA), where he has worked since 1988. His areas of activity at CTAA encompass an array of technical assistance to transportation agencies, transportation-related community and economic development initiatives, training and professional development, transit technology, and helping guide the association’s policy agenda around topics of public transportation planning, programming and community participation.

Chris’s current projects at CTAA focus on using transportation as a catalyst for economic development in rural communities, helping improve the participation of low-income and minority community stakeholders in promoting environmental justice in rural areas and small cities, and advancing the ways in which all modes of transportation are planned and designed in smaller cities and metropolitan areas. Over his years at CTAA, Chris has managed several of CTAA’s federal technical assistance projects, developed the association’s perspectives on policy matters for federal agencies and congressional offices, and has trained hundreds of rural and urban transit managers in the skills of public transportation management.

Chris came to CTAA’s predecessor from the Capital Metropolitan Transit Authority in Austin, Texas, where he supervised the transit authority’s paratransit reservation and dispatching systems.