2009 ENE Outstanding Alumni Awards
Mary Spiess Smith
BSE IDE, ARCHITECTURAL ENGINEERING, 1974
Senior Vice President and Director of Parking Consulting Walker Parking Consultants
MARY SPIESS SMITH IS Director of Parking Consulting for Walker Parking Consultants. Since joining Walker in 1975, she has been actively involved in all phases of parking planning and design for parking projects ranging up to 40,000 spaces (a project in Dubai). Among her particular areas of expertise are pedestrian and vehicular circulation, wayfinding and flow capacity in mega-parking complexes; impact of changing vehicle sizes on parking dimensions; accessible parking design; and integrating shared parking, parking management, operations, and functional design. She was elected a Vice President of Walker in 1988 and has served several terms on its Board of Directors. In 1996, she was named Senior Vice President.
Mrs. Smith is widely acknowledged as one of the leading parking planners and functional designers in the world. She is co-author of PARKING STRUCTURES: Planning, Design, Construction, Maintenance, and Repair. She has written multiple chapters for the ULI/NPA Dimensions of Parking, the parking section of the American Institute of Architects’ Architectural Graphics Standards (1998), the chapter on parking for the second edition (2000) of the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE’s) Transportation Planning Handbook (currently being updated), and the parking section of the American Planning Association’s Planning and Urban Design Standards (2006). She is also the lead author for the second edition of Shared Parking (2005), commissioned by the Urban Land Institute and the International Council of Shopping Centers.
Elected to the Parking Consultants Council (PCC) of the National Parking Association (NPA) in 1984, Mrs. Smith has led the development of multiple PCC publications. She also served as representative for ITE, the International Parking Institute and NPA to COST 342, a European Union technical organization project that studied the experience gained internationally with the effects of parking and parking policy. In 1992, she was presented with the prestigious Bernard Dutch Memorial Award. Mrs. Smith was the youngest person ever to receive what is considered the “lifetime achievement award” of the parking consulting profession. She also received a 1992 NPA Outstanding Service Award .
Mrs. Smith resides in Zionsville, Indiana, with her husband, R. Douglas Smith (BS Ag Econ, 1971). They have three children: Bradley, Geoff (BS Mgmt, 2007), and Emily, a junior at Purdue majoring in family and marriage therapy.