Transit agencies are under increasing pressure to modernize aging infrastructure, expand service, and adapt to rapidly evolving technologies, all while managing limited resources and growing complexity. In this environment, advisory services are playing a more critical role in helping agencies plan, prioritize, and deliver major capital programs.

Garo Hovnanian, executive VP of advisory services at STV, works closely with agencies across North America to navigate these challenges. In this Consultant Roundtable, Hovnanian speaks about the biggest hurdles facing transit providers today, how advisory services can bring clarity and efficiency to project delivery, and the strategies agencies can use to manage risk and prepare for a future shaped by electrification, resilience, and emerging mobility solutions.

Advisory Services and STV

Q: You lead advisory services at STV, working closely with agencies to develop strategy and deliver programs. What are the biggest challenges transit agencies face today when planning and executing large capital programs?

Hovnanian: Transit agencies are navigating a uniquely complex environment. They’re balancing the urgency of addressing infrastructure needs with expectations for modernization and expansion. At STV, our 2026 – 2028 Strategic Plan reinforces a local-first approach that helps us understand these complexities at a granular level in our local communities across North America.

Energy consumption and power demand are reshaping infrastructure across transportation and utilities, so STV is building on our existing strengths to expand into targeted areas, such as substations, transmission, electrification, grid resilience, and other power infrastructure that directly connect to our communities’ needs.

Q: Many transit agencies are managing aging infrastructure while also pursuing system expansion and modernization. How can advisory services help agencies prioritize investments and deliver projects more efficiently?

Hovnanian: Our clients are facing shifting expectations and more complexity. They need partners who can bring judgment and clarity, not just deliverables.

Transit agencies are balancing multiple priorities: providing safe, reliable service; managing fiscal health; modernizing and expanding; and supporting their workforce, and they must do all of that with finite capital, capacity, and time.

 For agencies managing both backlog and growth, our role is to help them clearly understand tradeoffs, opportunities, and constraints across their entire portfolio. Effective advisory services bring structure, clarity, and confidence to projects at the moments that matter. But most importantly, they help agencies step back from individual projects and focus on the outcomes they’re working to achieve.

 That means grounding decisions in data, scenario planning, and long-range strategy, so leaders can allocate resources to achieve the greatest community impact and move more efficiently from concept to completion. Often, this process leads agencies to refine or rescope projects to advance the outcomes they’ve committed to. That frees up capacity and ultimately delivers more of the right projects, not just more projects.

Risk Management and How Consultants Can Help Resilience

Q: Risk management has become a major focus for large transportation programs. What best practices are emerging to help agencies anticipate and manage risk throughout the project lifecycle?

Hovnanian: Our clients want speed, certainty, and modern delivery models. We’re seeing a strong shift toward more collaborative, transparent, and proactive risk management models that move toward shared accountability.

Governance models with shared incentives, such as progressive design-build or alternative billing structures, promote joint problem-solving and innovation. Equally important is bringing risk analysis upstream, well before procurement, so agencies can anticipate challenges and their implications, and build stronger delivery strategies. The most effective programs embed advisory services as a continuous practice.

The AEC industry is collecting more project data than ever before, but too often it’s relegated to backward-looking reporting rather than forward-looking decision-making. The strongest risk mitigation strategies leverage predictive insights to understand trends, identify emerging risks, and make smarter real-time decisions. It requires embedding high-quality data into projects from day one and, even more importantly, bringing in experts who can translate between those tools and the project environment, so agencies can see risks earlier and act on them faster.

Q: Looking ahead, how do you see advisory services evolving as transit agencies face new challenges, such as electrification, resilience planning, and emerging mobility technologies?

Hovnanian: Advisory services will increasingly serve as the connector between policy, planning, design, operations, and technology, enabling agencies to make implementable, future-ready decisions. Our role is to help agencies understand what’s changing, why it matters, and how to sequence decisions so their networks can evolve to meet shifting community needs.

As electrification and mobility technologies evolve, agencies are drawn into conversations about energy, digital systems, and long-term resilience. They’re negotiating for power availability for battery-electric fleets amidst rising data center presence. The pace and complexity of these shifts are moving faster than traditional planning cycles, which is why even the most capable agency can benefit from advisory perspectives that provide specialized technical depth and the ability to consider factors beyond the traditional bounds of transportation.

We’re mobilizing our experts to anticipate what their communities will need 10, 20, even 50 years from now. That includes guiding zero-emission fleet transitions, designing environmental shocks, and integrating new mobility tools into traditional networks that can flex with changing needs and unlock long-term community benefits.

Ultimately, our goal is to help agencies bring structure, foresight, and cross-disciplinary alignment to shape their future transportation networks.