The city of Detroit hired a veteran in transportation planning and engineering to lead its mobility efforts.

Mark de la Vergne started in his role this week as the chief of mobility for the city. He will oversee the city's new mobility innovation office and spearhead pilots and "experimental" policies to deploy mobility solutions in the city, including developing a mobility plan to address the needs of city residents and work to secure funding for those initiatives.

Mayor Mike Duggan and de la Vergne were not available Wednesday afternoon to comment on the new role.

Prior to joining the city, de la Vergne served as the principal of growth and innovation for traffic and transportation planning and engineering firm Sam Schwartz Consulting LLC in Chicago. There he managed Chicago's plan for pedestrians and cycling. Before that he served as principal at Land Strategies Inc. He earned a bachelor's in systems engineering from University of Pennsylvania.

The city of Detroit has been searching for a chief of mobility for the past several months.

Detroit's need for improved mobility is well documented. In Detroit, 108,000, or 61 percent of employed Detroit residents, travel outside the city for their jobs, according to a 2015 Corporation for a Skilled Workforce study. About 46 percent of those travel more than 10 miles from home, the study said. Unreliable transportation for the city's residents precludes many from finding those jobs in the suburbs.

But in the aftermath of its bankruptcy and trying to fix more basic services for its residents, Detroit has been mostly on the sidelines of the region's mobility efforts, including the establishment of the autonomous car testing sites in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, and other initiatives to test and research car sharing and other mobility services.

Earlier this year, Detroit lost out on the $50 million Smart City Challenge created by the Obama administration to integrate self-driving cars, connected vehicles and smart sensors into a city's transportation network to boost its residents' mobility. Local stakeholders said the lack of a cohesive leadership strategy was the barrier. Now, with de la Vergne tying the entire region together, a unified mobility strategy could be at play.