Who doesn't find themselves in traffic wondering why signals are timed the way they are. But there is a greater logic to the traffic network than to streamline our personal commutes, and I wanted to talk to someone who is in the nitty-gritty of transportation operations. I googled Raleigh + Traffic Engineer and before I knew it I had an hour with Jed Niffenegger in downtown Raleigh the next day. Here is a snippet of our conversation on September 25th. 

DB: What is your official job title?

JN: I believe it’s Senior Transportation Engineer; I manage Raleigh’s transportation program.  

DB: And what does that entail?

JN: The traffic engineering program has about 44 people in it. And it’s broken up into a couple of things. The streets are divided into three entities: private streets, public -- which are either local jurisdiction (county, township, city) -- and state highway system. The feds are rolled into the state highway system because the states maintain them. In Raleigh we have about 1500 miles of road. We maintain the signs, the markings and the traffic signals for the entire area. Even the DOT roads: they reimburse us through a municipal agreement. (The rational is that they don’t have the staffing to do it… if you live in the city you pay a higher tax rate.  With this higher tax rate you expect a higher level of service so the city provides maintenance (can do so at a higher level).)

We also have a signal system, which is downstairs in the basement. What that is—we have twenty CCTV monitors, with pan, tilt and zoom so we can monitor traffic. We maintain six hundred traffic signals. They are all connected via fiber-optic cables. So we can run timing programs. A good example [he pulls out a map of the city with some thoroughfares highlighted in green]: We come up with corridors that we know have a predominant movement… this [pointing to one green line] will be inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening. [He points to a gap in an otherwise continuous green corridor] We get better ‘green band’, which is better movement of a platoon of vehicles, if we break it up. So, we have all these different corridor plans and we are constantly making changes because people’s driving behavior changes over time. We run multiple plans—for some of the big corridors we may run a plan from midnight to five a.m., then another for the a.m. peak, then there’s a break, and you might have a lunch plan, and then a break… so they do that in the signal system.

In addition to that, we’ve got the streetlight program. We lease about 32,000 streetlights from Duke Energy. All cities pretty much have streetlights; most of them all lease them. We are in the process of upgrading them to LEDs – they provide a bit better light dispersion (so when you’re driving down the road, they’re a little more consistent).

We also have the red light camera program which is actually very contentious, which dumbfounds me a little bit. We run our [program] completely differently from others. We pick locations that have a high frequency of angle crashes, or ‘t-bones’, which tend to be more severe. We’ve had whitepapers done, documentation, that show that these devices, when located appropriately, decrease red light run and therefore angle crashes and increase safety. The way the program works is we pay a third-party vendor to do it, and the fee that we collect pays for that. I have one staff that does all the approvals… you got your degree in meteorology?

DB: I did…

JN: He did too, hah hah. He got his masters in civil engineering. So he’s running that program now. Then I have something called a traffic-calming program, which is also very contentious.

DB: What is that?

JN: Most cities have them… 

A lot of the older infrastructure was built around a vehicle-centric mode of transportation. It’s not as friendly for walking or cycling, and there’s a big push for bike lanes and more sidewalks and greenways.

Also they often laid [the old roads] out in a straight line. Well if you have a straight line vehicles tend to go fast. So streets with demonstrated speed compliance issues, we can go in and install speed humps, or horizontal deflection devices (like put a median here, then a bump out there and a bump out here) and create a weaving effect, which slows traffic. That’s pretty much the gamut of the programs I have.

DB: Yeah, I’ve seen the weaving effect on streets in my hometown… it’s effective. Annoying, but effective.

JN: Yeah the humps are what [we hear] are really annoying.

DB: How long have you been working with the City of Raleigh?

JN: I started in the summer of ’06.

DB: And what kind of budget do you work with now?

JN: My operating budget is probably around… [opens large binder] ten or twelve million dollars. And that’s just operating costs. I also have capital improvement program funds. The fiber optic signal system upgrade was a $28M project, so we had to manage that. Every year for the employee salary, contracts, equipment, all the materials and supplies, it’s about ten to twelve million.

DB: And where were you before the City of Raleigh.

JN: Well, I kind of did what you are doing. When I was in college I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Math was always easy for me. And a friend of mine, his father ran a construction company. I always liked building stuff, tinkering with stuff, y’know. Some people’s minds are just wired like that, they’re mechanically inclined. So I went to [North Carolina] State for engineering straight out of high school. I didn’t really have a compass forward. I just kind of kept going. I thought maybe I wanted to do Architecture, I took some classes and decided I didn’t like that at all. So I finished up in Civil Engineering with an option in Construction Management. And when I graduated the economy was just booming and I kind of got caught up in that. Companies were flying recruiters down to try to get kids straight out of college because the work was so plentiful. I got caught up in that and took a job. I only worked for a couple of days before I said, ‘What am I doing?’ Because originally I wanted to do like you, I wanted to travel. I couldn’t find anyone to travel far with, so I was doing trips in North Carolina. I still didn’t have any direction. I asked around and people said, ‘Why don’t you go to NCDOT, they have a great training program. You’re not going to work long hours, but you’ll get a good foot in the door. And if you’re going to work in transportation, everyone has to use DOT standards.’ So I applied and got a job. I worked there, and the first three years I was just out having fun and wasn’t really thinking about professional careers. If you’re an engineer there’s something called being a Professional Engineer – a P.E. There’s two parts to it: You take what’s called Fundamentals of Engineering (an exam, usually straight out of school) And it’s pretty much an SAT for engineering. It’s an eight-hour test. [I mime shooting myself] Yeah. And if you pass it you’ve got to work four years under an engineer. And then you have to apply to take the P.E. [exam]. Well about that time I was tired of working at the DOT. At the time, their benefits package was set up where (kind of a flaw)if you work five years you were fully vested (meaning, whenever you were ready to retire you got their health insurance).

DB: Oh my god, yeah. Flaw for them, great for you.

JN: Now it’s twenty-five years, but back then it was five. So I got my P.E. and right at five years I didn’t have any job. So I took a cross-country trip like you’re doing trying to figure out what to do with myself. And I love rock climbing, surfing, skiing, I like being outside. I thought, ‘Maybe I want to do something I’m a little more passionate about.’ Well, I talked to a lot of people, met a lot of people. I came to the realization that, when your passion becomes your job, a lot of the times your passion…

DB: Dies out?

JN: …yeah. The other thing: in a lot of these jobs you’re guiding someone climbing. It’s not a very high-paying job. So the grass is greener. “You can go climbing on the weekends and still make a decent living” 

And the consensus I got from talking to people was: live your life to the fullest on the weekends, and find a job that you’re reasonably happy with. 

So I came back. I started applying, I got a few offers, one to do roadway design and construction management-type stuff. That job was: hire an engineering firm, oversee them, go to all the public meetings, do all the public interaction, go to city council, do all that. And then, once everything got approved, then go to construction. I managed the construction projects, worked with  the inspectors,  do the pay invoices, make sure NCDOT is happy, make sure all the regulatory red tape is done. Or sometimes we do the design in-house. I worked there about a year and a half and then got promoted over to here, which is traffic engineering. I knew about traffic engineering, but didn’t have any formal training. Then when I got here I got more and more programs put under me. So that’s where I’m at today.

DB: How did they come to trust you with these programs? Did you just get on-the-job experience.

JN: Maybe I’m a quick learner. I knew some of it when I came in. I wasn’t that clueless. Because when you go to school you learn a little about a lot. I already had a little knowledge, and there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but it came pretty quickly. Learning never stops. It’s a little different than college where it’s so intense where you’re cramming for a final, versus maybe going to Spain for a year and by the end you’re speaking fluent Spanish. It’s a little like that. A little bit of osmosis.

DB: I’m very thirsty for a work environment where I feel like I could absorb anything through osmosis.

JN: I think if you have an open mind and you listen to people, that can come pretty quickly. But you need an environment where people are willing to talk to you about what they do. When I was at DOT it was like cube city. Do you remember that movie Office Space? It was like that, it just wasn’t—I couldn’t do it. Like a rat in a cage.

DB: That’s the opposite of the dream. Did you ever have any other career paths that you considered other than traffic engineering?

JN: 

To be honest, when I went to school I didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I graduated I still didn’t know. This just kind of fell on me. I like what I’m doing now. Will I be doing it ten years from now? I don’t know.

DB: Is that what you mean by, ‘I’m probably not the typical guy to talk to’?

JN: Some people are very career motivated. I will say I work very hard and I take my work very seriously. I think that’s probably resulted in where I’m at today. Not anything due to applying to all positions – like I didn’t even want to apply for this position. I got asked a couple of times by a few people saying, ‘you should apply.’ I really like what I’m doing, I like my staff, and I think we are making changes. I like the idea of civil servitude. In engineering you can either go public or private. If you go public, what you’re doing is projects for DOT or municipalities. And then there’s the other side, the private engineers who are working for developers, and that might not be in the best interest for the general public. They always have to bo attentive of billable hours like an attourny. My role is to look out for all 400,000 residents, not one specific one. Civil Engineering, in my humble opinion, is a profession that is more suited to civil servitude. We are building infrastructure. Infrastructure is something that everyone needs. That’s my take anyway.

DB: So, what’s your day-to-day like?

JN: Uhh [pulls up his calendar, which has three to six appointments every single day.] Sometimes it’s lighter, sometimes I get double- or triple-booked. Meetings and meetings and meetings. I have a shop downtown. The shop has 31 individuals and the admin, 32. One part is signs, one part is signals. So the signal part has all these cabinets, electrical things, and parts. The sign shop is full fabrication. We can make any sign (except interstate signs). We get the blanks from department of corrections, we sheet them with a high-intensity prismatic sheeting, and FHWA mandates all this stuff. So they go out there and install all of the signs. They also do pavement markings using something called thermoplastic, which is a plastic that uses heat to apply – the yellow and white lines. It has glass beads embedded in it to be reflective. It is unbelievably durable. We also do something called the visual obstruction program where they check the sight triangles, which make sure you have adequate unimpeded lines of sight for oncoming traffic. The other component of the job is just emails – I probably get one hundred plus per day. A lot of them from citizens, a lot from elected officials or my boss, a lot from staff. 

You’ve just got to prioritize fires: which one’s the worst, and put it out. 

I’ll be doing emails at night. I also have public meetings quite a bit.

We are a growing city. We are exponentially growing. There are some four hundred thousand residents and we’re supposed to be eight hundred thousand in ten or twenty years. The problem is that we have to work very closely with all the other departments. Next to me, David Eaton, he runs the transportation program, all the CAT busses. He manages all of that. They keep talking about a half-cent sales tax for a light rail between Durham and Chapel Hill, but Wake County hasn’t voted on it yet. The other thing is, because the city is a lot smaller than the state, we interact with elected officials a lot more. Which… [long pause] they’re elected officials. They have constituents that have complaints, which sometimes are legitimate and sometimes are not. We have to deal with all four hundred thousand people. One doesn’t get priority over the next. If there is an emergency issue or a safety issue we deal with those first.

DB: And I feel like traffic is one of those things citizens single out first when looking to complain.

JN: Yep, we get calls from attorneys once or twice a week. We have six hundred signals we maintain and you’ve heard the term ‘ambulance chasers’ right? They come after us. The reason is, the state has a liability cap at $500,000, municipalities don’t. So they come after us. And attorneys actually know this MUTCD [motions at boat anchor on his desk] almost as well as we do. And it doesn’t matter if a signal has a component that malfunctioned over here [left hand] and the crash occurred over here [right hand. If it goes to a juried trial, some of this stuff is complex anda jury may not comprehends it Usually we have a law suit pending, one that we know is coming, and one that’s ongoing. We work with the police quite a bit regarding that. A lot of times they’ll ask us for our expertise regarding what the signal function was doing, trying to get a better understanding of the situation at large so they can charge or not charge the person(s) appropriately.

DB: Wow you have a lot on your plate!

JN: Oh! That’s another thing, the safety program. I have one staffer in the safety program and what he does is… There are around 20,000 reported crashes, and there are a lot that go unreported (on public right-of-way, this isn’t including parking lots). We file those, every year. The police reports range from really good to the other end of the spectrum. [On his computer Jed shows me a crash diagram for a particular intersection, derived from two years of police reports. A dozen rear-end crashes are listed at each of the entrances to the intersection. A half-dozen angle and side-swipe crashes are diagrammed in the middle, some with circles to indicate injuries.] Any time you have a signal there are going to be rear-end crashes. Not to say we don’t care about those, but those usually aren’t the ones that warrant our attention. The angle crashes are the ones [we focus on]. [Jed deftly navigates file folders by cross streets]

DB: I bet you know this city like the back of your hand.

JN: [Nods in assent]. Most of the conflict points occur right at the intersection. So we go out and try installing counter measures, change the signalization to mitigate the crashes. It can be a minor thing, like right around the capital there were a bunch of crashes from people running the red light. So we put the T-heads, the dual reds at the top, and crashes have been cut in half. 

So little things like that and five people didn’t get in an angle crash. So that’s a kind of warm-and-fuzzy feeling.

DB: That’s great! That’s awesome. Is there a lag between countermeasures and measuring the improvements?

JN: Of course. [Measuring improvements] is something that, the more time you give it, the better. But you don’t want to give it too much time because traffic increases. The sweet spot that we typically look at is three years. But if we make a countermeasure, we will typically see a substantial drop in crashes after the first year.

DB: Do you ever have problems with staff turnover?

JN: Well, any job has turnover, but DOT and the private sector seems like a revolving door. I’ll deal with a consultant and, ‘Oh I’m no longer here, here’s my new card.’ The staff I have is really good and I have very little turnover. The majority has been people retiring. We have a pension system, which is nice. You work 30 years for the city, and they take your four highest-paying years, average them, and you get about sixty percent of that [every year] until you die. And that’s why no one does pensions anymore.

DB: Yep, because they were just too sweet. My generation’s screwed.

JN: Yeah.