Licensed Traffic Engineer · Deputy Director of Public Works · City of Concord, California
I'm a practicing traffic engineer in California. TrafficGrants.ai is one of a handful of side projects I've been working on in evenings and weekends, trying to put a few of the tools I wish I'd had over the past decade-plus into the hands of other local agency staff. They're all still very much works in progress.
Whether the question of the day is writing a grant, picking the right safety countermeasure for a school zone, working through a federal-aid procedural checklist, or responding to the third neighborhood traffic-calming request this week, the day-to-day of local-agency transportation work runs on judgment that takes years to build. The criteria evolve, manuals get rewritten, but the shape of what good practice looks like stays similar from cycle to cycle.
That institutional knowledge tends to live with the few people who've been around long enough to remember why something was done the way it was. Newer staff and smaller agencies don't always have a way into that knowledge, and the official documents change faster than anyone can keep up with.
What I'm trying to build is a small set of tools that put some of that institutional memory somewhere any colleague in a California city can reach. Not to replace judgment, but to shorten the distance between a real problem and a defensible response.
"None of these are meant to replace judgment. They're meant to shorten the distance between a real problem and a defensible response."
I'm currently Deputy Director of Public Works for the City of Concord, where I lead the Transportation Division. Before this role I worked in private consulting, then at a regional planning agency, and have been on the local-agency side for the past decade-plus. That mix is mostly what I'm trying to draw on with these tools. None of it qualifies me to tell anyone how to do their job, but it has given me a working sense of where the same questions tend to come up across agencies, and what kind of small thing, surfaced at the right moment, would have saved me time on past projects.
What started as TrafficGrants.ai has slowly grown into a handful of tools, each aimed at a recurring problem I kept running into in my own work. None of them are finished, and none of them are trying to be.
Each one gets built in evenings and weekends, mostly when something inside a current piece of work reminds me that a small utility would have saved me time on the last one. The communities and agencies that most need this kind of help are usually the ones with the least bandwidth to build it themselves, and chipping away at that gap, one small tool at a time, is most of why I keep at it.
Bug reports, feature ideas, questions about the data, all of it helps. But the most useful thing I can hear from local agency staff is what should get built next. A recurring question that keeps eating your day, a manual that's painful to navigate, a small utility that would save your team an afternoon: those are exactly the kind of problems these tools exist to solve.