Black Leaders in Transportation: Meet Lois Cooper

In honor of Black History Month, IBTTA is spotlighting leaders in tolling and transportation, starting with Lois Cooper.

Lois Cooper was the first Black female transportation engineer hired in the Engineering Department at the California Division of Highways, now known as the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). In addition, she was the first Black woman (and only second woman) in California to pass the Professional Engineers (PE) License Exam, achieving the designation on her first attempt. She was a pioneer who became an influential leader in the world of transportation engineering despite facing the adversity that simply accompanied being Black in the 1950s and 60s.

All of her achievements are remarkable on their own, but they only hint at another fact about Cooper that might not earn her as much recognition as it should: Cooper was a fantastically talented mathematician.

In her time at Caltrans, Cooper earned a reputation among the other (white, male) engineers as the one who could perform complex calculations correctly and fix their mistakes. And keep in mind that all of this is years before the use of calculators became widespread. 

"To design and build a freeway, you have to calculate the alignment. And everything is based on coordinates, sines and cosines. And so the world is divided up into this coordinate system," said Cooper in a wide-ranging interview she gave in 2005. She added that many times her colleagues would design a road but their calculations would leave holes between traverses (a surveying term that refers to a line connecting one set point to another). "The guys were doing calculations before I got there, and sometimes they’d calculate and the traverse wouldn’t close. So then you have to go back and figure out where you made a mistake," she said.

Cooper became her office-mates' go-to resource for correcting, connecting and closing those gaps. She'd put her math degree to good use meticulously poring over their calculations to see where things went wrong, and then close the traverse. "It got to the place where they just started giving me all the calculations, so they didn’t even do them anymore. They just gave them to me," she said.

Specific projects that bear the mark of Cooper's mastery of mathematics include several named freeways in Southern California, such as the I-105 Century Freeway, San Diego Freeway, Long Beach Freeway, San Gabriel River Freeway and Riverside Freeway. Later in life she became involved in the Los Angeles Council of Black Professional Engineers (LACBPE) and spent much of her time advocating for math and engineering education, while also teaching classes herself. 

Upon her passing in 2014, Cooper left a legacy of firsts and a passionate commitment to transportation engineering, as well as a singular can-do attitude that has inspired generations of Black engineers since. "If anybody...asked a question, if I didn’t know the answer, I would find the answer. I don’t believe in telling people, 'I don’t know,' and that’s it. That’s no such answer," said Cooper. "There are a lot of people that...if they don’t know the answer, they’re just, 'I don’t know,' and that’s the end of it. That’s just not me."