What got me into engineering were my math grades and the suggestion from my dad. It’s not a profession I’d ever heard of before he said it, but it stuck. I was accepted at University and never looked back. There were parts of the program that truthfully didn’t appeal to me at all, but there was so much diversity to choose from! Fast forward through undergrad, I got to do a thesis in transportation and was totally hooked! In my opinion, transportation engineering has all the best parts of engineering. No two communities are alike,so all projects also look different. The work is meaningful and changes in the industry and cities keep it exciting.
When it comes to inventing amazing, the key is to be the one to look at the problem differently. You need to be really in touch with how people live, how they move in their communities and what’s holding them back. When you can remove the problem - the one others have been trying to solve, you’ve done something great!
The favourite projects are the ones where I think made a real difference in my city of Calgary, when I’ve been able to meaningfully bring together a number of partners. As an example, in 2017, a community asked me to help tackle a pedestrian corridor beneath an inner-city flyover. In this project, local elementary and university students worked together to redesign a community space where active transportation and community redevelopment had been limited for decades. I believe you can either be great at observing a community or you can be great at listening - or both. In my case, not really either specifically (!) but I was able to design the project in such a way that technical experts met up with the students throughout the project. Students performed the site visits, took on role play activities to empathise with different community members. All groups listened to each other because they could see how the technical wisdom and communities feelings fit together. Then, when the students helped me present our plan to Council, the plan was sound and had the added benefit of showing 57 grade six students that they could impact their city.
I’m also really excited for new things that are quickly becoming part of the transportation engineer’s domain. Last year I hosted a pedestrian hackathon where The City of Calgary welcomed 46 experts from all backgrounds to use open data to solve an important problem. My job was to find mentors to guide the teams who had technical skills but less experience in urban issues. Together the groups came up with relevant and innovative approaches to some problems we knew about and some we didn’t. I loved seeing the technology mesh and tell the story of what it’s like to walk in Calgary. Following the hackathon we were able to fund two of the projects that directly benefit our work. One of the projects estimates the travel-time penalty associated with lowering residential speed limits, which will help our public engagement on this topic this year.
Transportation engineers have some important problems to work on - saving lives, building cities, and helping more kids walk to school, to name just a few. If you know someone good at math and looking at the way people experience communities, they just might like to be a transportation engineer, too!
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.