What does a city traffic engineer do, anyway?
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BY LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star
When Randy Hoskins looked at the news Tuesday, he learned his job was squarely on the budget chopping block.
The city traffic engineer position he fills was listed there, in black and white, somewhere between $10,000 in proposed cuts for the Fourth of July celebration and $175,000 more in sidewalk repairs.
Two council members floated the idea of eliminating the position at an informal meeting Monday — one among dozens of ideas to cut Mayor Coleen Seng’s proposed $131.7 million budget proposal.
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Three days later, the council voted unanimously to keep Hoskins’ position on the table, despite Public Works Director Karl Fredrickson’s argument that eliminating the position would be a “terrible mistake.”
It’s not a done deal just yet. A public hearing on the budget will be Aug. 7. Council members formally will adopted a budget 10 days later.
So, what does a city traffic engineer do? Do the city need one? If the position were cut, who would do the work Hoskins has been doing 40 hours a week for the past four years?
The Journal Star interviewed Hoskins last week. Here, in edited form, are his responses:
As city traffic engineer, what do you do?
I manage three sections of the engineering services division — the street operations, the long-range planning and development services. Street operations is traffic signals, signs, markings, all that stuff you see out there on the street. The transportation long-term planning section is looking at what are we going to do with the roads over the next 20, 50, 100 years. Development services is actually when a developer comes in and proposes to put in a new subdivision, a new commercial area. We look at those plans and review them, primarily looking at them from a traffic, transportation standpoint.
Can you give me examples of specific steps you’ve taken to ease traffic concerns?
We’ve done a lot of, I think, really good things during the time I’ve been here. I certainly can’t take credit for all of it because a lot of good things already were going on before I got here.
We’ve changed the way that we install traffic signals. We’ve changed a lot of our thinking as far as signing and striping. I think we’ve been more proactive in access management, looking at where businesses’ driveways are, because that makes a big impact in how many cars you can move up and down the roads and the safety on those roadways.
Safety has been one of my big points of emphasis in the time I’ve been here. Every year we do a safety study, looking at the high-crash locations around town. ... Then what we do with that is we go out to those high-crash locations and fix the things that are wrong.
What better bang for your buck than to go out and prevent crashes, which result in injuries, sometimes death? To me, when I look at the number of pedestrians that are hit each year, the number of bicycles that are hit each year, the number of car crashes we have, those have, as a rate, gone down basically every year I’ve been here. To me, that’s one of the most satisfying parts of the job.
Can you give me a specific intersection that has been a problem that you helped do something about?
Boy, there’s a lot of them. I’ll give you a really simple example. At Ninth and Van Dorn we were having a lot of rear-end crashes with southbound traffic. We got to looking at them and we said, “Hey, if we put a signal over here on this pole on the right, which is on the wrong side of the intersection from where you normally put signal heads, people are going to be able to see that a lot sooner and they’ll know if the light’s going to be red when they get there.” We put that in and, lo and behold, the crash rate dropped almost instantly.
We’ve done the roundabout projects and those have been just fantastic: the way that those have dropped the number of crashes that occurred and at the same time the efficiency of those intersections has really increased. So that was a total win-win from our point of view. There were a lot of naysayers ... but we had confidence and it’s really proven out.
I’ve had people call me up in the last few days and say, “If for no other reason they should keep you because those roundabouts worked out so well.”
The idea was already moving by the time I got here, but then I certainly threw my support behind it and made sure we were able to get those in.
Where would you say the trouble spots are now in Lincoln?
Obviously your major intersections, where you’ve got real heavy traffic in both directions.
Forty-eighth and O has perennially been one of our top of the list as far as crashes occurring. We’re doing a lot of work out there now, and we’re hopeful that’s really going to work out. People focus on everything else that’s going on out there — the new development and that sort of stuff — but from our standpoint, putting in right-turn lanes and dual lefts are going to help out the safety considerably.
The Highway 2 corridor: you’ve got a lot of traffic out there, a lot of trucks. It’s too much traffic really for the amount of road.
Probably one of the things that got me into trouble (was) the 27th Street corridor. It’s an area that a two-lane arterial, in the midst of four and six lanes out at the ends that runs from edge of town to edge of town, that doesn’t work real well. But on the other hand, to try to fix that and widen that would be hugely expensive and it’s not supported by at least a portion of the community. So that would be a major undertaking to try to correct that.
Do you have any other places on your radar that could become problem areas?
We’ve been in the process of updating the city’s long-range transportation plan, so we’re looking at what the traffic volumes might be like in the year 2030 and we run a model to see what that will look like.
I was rather shocked the other day when I looked at the intersection of 84th and O. In the year 2030 there will be about 100,000 cars a day going through there. To give you a ball park, 48th and O, when it was open, was carrying about 60,000 cars a day. Right now, the most we’ve got anywhere is about 60,000 cars a day. And that one (84th and O) would be carrying 100,000 cars a day. Obviously that intersection is going to take some major work.
Even with the south beltway being put in, the volumes on Highway 2 through town will be higher than they are now. As the volume on that grows, and the streets that intersect with it grow, that’s going to get even worse than it is now.
You’ve talked about a lot of different things that you do as part of your job. Who would be doing those if your job didn’t exist?
My understanding is they’re saying Roger Figard, the city engineer, would be picking up those items. As busy as he is now, he’s just not going to be capable of picking all that up. And it’s going to go to other staff members around here to try to pick up that load. I can tell you there aren’t a lot of folks around here looking for stuff to do.
Some things are going to suffer. Some things aren’t going to get done. I think we pride ourselves on our responsiveness to the citizens of this community, the political appointees. We try to get them information that they request or action that they request. Unfortunately, that’s one of the things that would suffer some. As you’re trying to do more with less bodies, you just can’t get it all done.
What kind of priority might citizen complaints get? Is that something where it could take longer to get back to people than it does now?
I would say that’s a definite possibility. I don’t know how they would want to handle that .... A lot of times government gets this faceless bad name because they’re not responsive. That could become more of a problem.
Could you talk me through what a typical day might be like for you?
I spend a lot of time in meetings. There are so many projects and so many things going on that I’m involved in .... That’s a lot of it. I get tons of e-mails that I try to respond to. I can get e-mail on my cell phone now, so if I have any time between meetings I’m usually looking at e-mail on there. Then, answering phone calls from elected officials, from citizens, with questions or concerns. “Can I get a turn signal out here?” and take your pick of two streets. I guess when I’m actually here in the office there’s usually a line of staff people sitting outside my door. They take the chance to ask about projects they’re working on.
Does a city need a city traffic engineer?
Whether it’s me or somebody else, I think it’s vitally important for the city to have a traffic engineer. I think you would be hard pressed to find a city the size of Lincoln that doesn’t have one. It’s interesting, I believe (City Councilwoman) Robin Eschliman recently conducted a survey of her own that looked at what are the issues facing Lincoln and I believe the top two items were job creation and traffic. I guess on one hand you could say I’m not doing my job. I don’t necessarily agree with that point of view.
There’s lots of traffic issues that pop up daily here in this town. ... It’s kind of an art of balancing those and looking at what is best for the community as far as, from my point of view anyway, moving cars not just today but looking down the road and thinking about what it’s going to be like.
Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.
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