Like many engineers, I spent hours playing with Legos! I can remember Christmas one year where every gift I opened was some sort of Lego set. All the hours spent with Legos planted the engineer seeds in my head.
When my family moved to suburban Chicago before I started 8th grade, I remember being fascinated by the massive network of highways, railroads, and subway lines that formed the backbone of the city. However, I concluded that many of the traffic signals were poorly timed and coordinated! I figured out traffic and transportation issues largely fell within civil engineering, which I decided to major in at Iowa State University.
For the first 13 years after I graduated, I worked in consulting for CBB in St. Louis, MO and SRF Consulting Group in Minneapolis, MN, where I gained valuable engineering and management experience on a variety of large and small traffic and transportation projects involving not only traffic operations and signal timing, but transportation planning and
forecasting, traffic modeling and analysis, and traffic design and construction.
A year ago I decided to start a new chapter and took a senior traffic operations engineer position with the City of Minneapolis. In this role, my team and I are responsible for signal, signing, and striping operations and maintenance. Minneapolis has a complex and robust transportation system, and we are responsible for preserving that system while carefully making revisions and improvements to better serve the public. I regularly call upon my consulting experience to tackle challenges I face on a daily basis. Additionally, I have the opportunity to be involved in exciting things transforming the City’s transportation system including complete streets, the increasing popularity of shared mobility, and connected vehicles.
ITE is recognizing National Engineers Week 2019. Throughout the week, there will be posts from ITE members reflecting on how they chose to become transportation engineers, the importance of transportation engineers, and the need for diversity in the transportation profession.
This blog is taken from the Member-to-Member of October 2018 of ITE Journal.