Sam Zimbabwe
November 25, 2019 — People
Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT)
Sam Zimbabwe has been Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) since January 2019. He came to SDOT from Washington, DC, where he served in senior management positions at the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), first as the Associate Director for Policy, Planning & Sustainability, and then as DDOT’s first Chief Project Delivery Officer, responsible for transportation planning, capital project design and construction, traffic engineering and signals, and transit service delivery. Prior to joining DDOT, Sam was the Director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development, a national nonprofit partnership dedicated to leveraging transit investments to preserve and create equitable communities.
Sam has a background in urban design and transportation planning and spent five years working for urban design and architecture firms in the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds a Master’s degree in City Planning from University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University.