“Having a small, nimble office that can take on new challenges, and also sometimes tasks that are not so out of the box,” Jacob Wessel, senior director, special projects in the Office of Strategic Innovation at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority said of his innovation team. “That can be really crucial to have at the ready.”
Metro has been testing tiny portable restrooms, produced by a company known as Throne Labs. They’ve been seen — and used — outside more than a dozen Metro stations. Wessel described the facilities as a “souped up porta potty meets little portable airline bathroom,” during a panel Wednesday at the CoMotion LA conference in downtown Los Angeles.
L.A. Metro had done a proof-of-concept project and study, Wessel said, to “really see how in four locations these restrooms were able to transform a lot of aspects of the transit service we were providing.”
Another not-so-typical take on standard, everyday equipment is the tethered drones the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) piloted to light up work zones. The drones, which offer overhead directional lighting, could take the place of the noisy, generator-powered spotlights common to roadsides.
“In rural areas where you don’t have a lot of lighting, these light up the workplace, the work area, without over-extending into neighborhoods,” Gloria Roberts, Caltrans District 7 director, said. The area includes Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
The pilot, in partnership with the state of Washington, ran from 2023 through June 2025, according to Caltrans documents. Partnerships with industry, Roberts said, are able to advance products and projects like this one.
In September, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) in Oregon, closed out its six-month Zero-Emission Delivery Zone Pilot in March, which carved out a 17-block area of downtown for testing the use of electric cargo-bikes, e-trucks, curb management technology and other digital assets.
The city stressed the pilot would only run for six months as part of a data-gathering exercise, “and then we are going to take it away,” Art Pearce, PBOT planning, programs and projects deputy director, said at CoMotion LA.
The initiative did “freak a whole lot of people out,” he said, noting the importance of being transparent with the public and businesses around the nature and scope of pilots.
“Once we redefined it away from, ‘the city has cooked this thing, and we’re going to force it down your throat,’ to ‘we’re going to learn about this together,’ people sort of shifted,” he said.
Pursuing unorthodox projects to address the needs and issues facing agencies is often at the core of innovation teams. But this ethos can also find its way across organizations, officials said.
Just because someone doesn’t work on the innovation team, “doesn’t mean that you don’t do innovation,” Roberts said, adding, the practitioners doing the work should be able to “have that avenue to propose new ideas and test it out.”
And of course, this means allowing a space for failure, and acknowledgment that not all ideas or projects will scale.
“One of the great challenges of government is that there is — historically — very little acceptance of failure,” Pearce said.
Sometimes there’s a need to “change the process, and say, ‘we actually don’t know the answer yet,’” he said. “We have to do a series of tests, and have a series of conversations, get feedback. And actually, the learning is the product.”
