BERNADETTE WAGENBLAST, born on this date is an American transportation journalist, radio personality and voice-over artist. She is the founder and editor of the Transportation Communications Newsletter. The newsletter originated as a discussion group in June 1998, evolving into its current format shortly thereafter. She also edits The AASHTO Daily Transportation Update, published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and hosts AASHTO’s ETAP Podcast^[2] and the ITE Talks Transportation podcast for the Institute of Transportation Engineers. She is known as the voice of automated announcements on the New York City Subway.

Wagenblast was a traffic reporter for the New York City office of Shadow Traffic/Metro Networks (a Westwood One company), where she began her career in the transportation field in 1979 as one of that company’s original on-air reporters. Through her work for Shadow, she appeared on several New York City radio stations over a five-year period, including WINS and WABC. On WABC she used the name Jack Packard, which was given to her by the station’s morning DJ Dan Ingram when Wagenblast began airing traffic reports on the station in December 1979. The name was based on a character from the old time radio program “I Love a Mystery”.

In 2024 she appeared as the voice of the subway conductor on the album Warriors by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis. In 2025 she made her off-Broadway debut voicing the train conductor in Dylan Mulvaney’s The Least Problematic Woman in the World. On January 1st, 2026, she served as the announcer for the public inauguration of Zohran Mamdani.

Wagenblast came out publicly as a trans woman in January 2023; although still going by Bernie, she said her full name would now be Bernadette. In an interview from June 2023, she said that although she had felt like a girl since age 4, she had been dissuaded against feminine dress or behavior at a young age. As a teenager she called Paula Grossman, the only openly trans woman she knew, from a payphone to try and find support. Wagenblast later confided in her wife, and in 2017 she told her adult daughters about her identity. She began privately coming out to friends and family in 2022.