Innovation Fall 2025

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explained, or as complex as outlining an entire electric vehicle, upgraded transit, and car/bike/scooter sharing system. Once a municipality awards a traffic engineering project contract, groups like CTS-BC, Bunt & Associates, and other traffic engineering firms will often start the planning process with a traffic study. In established neighborhoods, surveyors will count how many cars, buses, commercial vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists go by in a given period. In new developments with no existing traffic, projections can be made using similar and neighboring communities and estimating the potential traffic numbers from those figures. With that data in hand, experts like Liem and Vlieg can leverage international standards guides (e.g., those published by ISO or the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), or the World Road Association) to begin building a traffic flow plan covering items like the number of lanes, traffic signals, parking, curb space, and access to transit services. This surveying and modelling work can take anywhere from six months to more than a year to complete, as

Transportation is one of those weird things where we can calculate capacities and all the rest of it, but people’s capacity to absorb delay, for lack of a better term, sometimes astonishes me. Gary Vlieg, P.Eng., FEC, Vice-President CTS-BC

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municipalities and consultants iterate plans using tools like SYNCHRO (for traffic signal optimization), VISSIM (for simulating vehicle interactions at the micro-level), and Aimsun (for real-time traffic simulations) to best deliver on the community’s vision. And a lot can change during the process. “Maybe it means converting a two-way stop to an all-way stop,” Vlieg noted. “Maybe it means installing a left turn advance where there wasn’t one before. Maybe it means adding another lane for capacity.” Beyond the obvious transportation items, traffic engineers will also consider how structures in the proposed plan will impact movement, and vice versa. In fact, within structures themselves is where most of a traffic engineer’s work will be done, Liem said. For example, a traffic engineer may propose a change to the location of a residential building’s garage entrance to simplify access for large garbage trucks. Conversely, a traffic engineer may offer a list of potential tenants for a mixed-use building that limits curbside activities or build in more curbside drop-off points to allow car traffic to flow instead of idle. The final frontier: community buy-in But even the most technically sound traffic plans must pass through one final checkpoint: public acceptance. Whether it’s a new lane configuration or a redesigned intersection, the success of a traffic engineering project often hinges not just on data and design, but on how well it resonates with the people who use it every day. The governing body overseeing the traffic project, which varies by project type, is responsible for engaging with the public about the project. Smaller-scale and local projects will typically be led by the municipality’s

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Fall 2025

Innovation