Ask a City Nerd #4: Career Opportunities

Welcome to Ask a City Nerd. Got a question you want answered? Or not answered at all and instead I pivot to something I actually want to talk about? Submit it here! Submissions are lightly edited for typos, grammar, clarity, and a reasonable amount of anonymity.

Now to today's question:

As a longtime viewer and recent civil engineering college graduate, your content has always inspired me. I am starting a job in traffic design soon but have been a little unsure in the last year that what I am doing is right and the best course of action. I was wondering what you thought might be the best way for civil engineers to help implement better transportation systems in the US. Is it private design work? Public sector jobs like municipal engineers or in the DOT? Would love if you had any advice for aspiring civil engineers who want to contribute to a better built environment.

I get various forms of this kind of question a lot more often than you might expect, and I actually kind of love it. To be clear, when I hear, "I was partly inspired by your channel to (major in/go back to grad school in) planning or engineering," there's part of me that shudders with serious remorse, along the lines of: What have I done? What am I getting these people into?

But it's outweighed by a sense of optimism. The planning and engineering fields absolutely need more principled people entering the field — people who care about their cities and have strongly held notions that cities themselves have intrinsic value, that they shouldn't just be treated as places for people to drive through and occasionally park their cars.

Now, the question at hand is partly about a fairly specific engineering discipline, traffic design, but I want to make this piece useful for a broader audience. So we'll begin by zooming out just a bit, talking about different disciplines within transportation planning and engineering and how they interact, and then dive into questions about how emerging professionals can best position themselves to effect institutional change.

First of all, a bit of a disclaimer about the limits of my expertise on this. I am not a licensed Professional Engineer (PE), or really, any kind of engineer at all. (Someone should probably correct Wikipedia on this.) I actually was a civil engineering major at one point in undergrad, but I disliked the bloodlessness of it and the weird conservative/judgy culture of the type people who often choose this major, and I rebelled by getting a degree in English lit instead. Later (predictably underemployed), I got interested in urban planning and decided to pursue a graduate degree and embark on a new vocation. Soon after starting a master of urban and regional planning program, I realized my dormant aptitude for engineering work was a differentiator, and I should really lean into it to help launch my career. The transportation specialization within Portland State's MURP program offered the opportunity to take electives in the university's school of engineering, so I decided to max that out and take the most challenging courses possible. (I think I was the only planning student in the Traffic Operations course.)

Simultaneously, I interned at the Oregon Department of Transportation Region 1 office in downtown Portland (I had a graduate research assistantship, too — it was a busy time!), and spent lots of time interfacing with roadway designers and traffic engineers. This was probably about the time I started being known as "planner who can speak engineer," or "engineer whisperer," or being flat out mistaken for an engineer altogether. (It still happens all the time, and honestly, it probably has more to do with my vaguely on-the-spectrum demeanor than my skill set.)

My intention here isn't to give you a whole biography (maybe another time), but just to give you context on how I conceptualize the transportation planning and engineering ecosystem. There are a lot of disciplines involved, and they all have different types and degrees of impact on how our built environment evolves. The way I often think about it is the way the office was structured at the specialty transportation planning and engineering consulting firm where I worked for several years. We had three different "groups," roughly equally sized:

• Planning: Working with public agency clients to develop long range (20-25 year) transportation system plans; subcontracting on larger multidiscipline teams for work like environmental studies and alternatives analysis for transit projects; working on the transportation elements of things like rezoning and redevelopment projects. All of these look out 5-25 years and help determine investment priorities and planning-level design.
• Design: Taking a planning level idea and translating it into plan sheets that can be handed off to a construction contractor. At our firm, this was mostly "traffic design," which generates a specialized set of plan sheets that have to be coordinated with plan sheets from other disciplines like stormwater, electrical, architectural, and more. Traffic design plan sheets specify things like how travel lanes, crosswalks, and bike facilities will be striped and stenciled, as well as dimensions and placement of things like signals and lighting fixtures.
• Operations: Includes designing traffic signal logic and communications, including coordinated systems and sensors, and lots of other comms and network-dependent stuff like adaptive speed limits, active signage, and interface with evolving vehicle technologies.

These disciplines aren't necessarily sequential, but a successful planning project might lead to the firm getting the design work when a project is going to construction, and maybe even some operations work as well, say, for an adaptive signal system on a corridor

Now, note that of the 50 or so professional staff at my firm, only two or three of us had planning degrees; the rest were engineers. Engineers can really slot in at any of these levels: long-range planning, current planning and development review, conceptual design, final design, operations planning and implementation — they're all places where you can leverage a civil engineering degree into a career. As a general rule, the further up the chain you are, meaning closer to long range planning, the more likely you're going to find yourself engaging and influencing big policy questions; the more often you're going to find yourself in meetings with elected officials and high level staff; the more you're going to find yourself in conversations where your ideas, your findings, and your ability to communicate them are likely to impact city code, comprehensive plans, infrastructure priorities — really, all the kinds of wonky stuff that impacts how a city evolves.

On the other hand, if you place a higher value on seeing things get built that you had a hand in designing, you want to be further down the chain. There's a lot of professional satisfaction in that, and you're much more like to experience it as a designer than as a planner. Just be aware that most of the basic design decisions and priorities will have already been set before you even touch the project.

So here's my actual answer. There's definitely a path for traffic design folks to engage and impact the built envionment in a positive way. I think you're further away from the levers of power if you're at a consulting firm (where most of the elements of the projects you touch have already largely been ironed out), and you're more likely to be trapped in a morass of bureaucracy and immovable standards if you're at a state DOT. I think your best chance of working on projects that really move the needle on people-centered design and livable streets is with a city DOT.

Go check out my recent Minneapolis video, and imagine you work for a city that's building things like Bryant Avenue and Hennepin Avenue, street designs that are, in my mind, way, WAY out at the leading edge of U.S. city street design. And then consider that it's not just Minneapolis, or New York, or D.C., or Portland — cities all over the country are not just learning from each other, but implementing more and more best practices from international peer cities.

My final pitch here would be to just consider NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials. It's a body that's been around since 1996, but it didn't really get on a lot of people's radar until 2011 when it published its first street design guide. The idea of NACTO, to me anyway, is that it's an antidote to the highway-centric design paradigms of something like AASHTO's historically highly influential A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (AKA "The Green Book"). NACTO's guidance recognizes that design principles that are appropriate for interstates and highways, for exurban and rural contexts, just don't work for cities.

So, yeah. If I was entering the field with a civil engineering degree in 2026, I'd shop around for a position with a city that's all-in on NACTO guidance, and maybe something that straddles design and planning. Best of luck, job-seekers!