Traffic Jam

“You can always tell when Mitch is on the phone with Matt: his voice gets higher and higher and louder and louder.”
- Brian Goubeaux

Traffic engineers Matt Hoying and Mitch Thobe talk traffic daily. Both have the same traffic engineering education from the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety in Chicago, but you’d never know it—they argue about the minutiae of traffic engineering CONSTANTLY. Should the pole be located here or two inches to the left? Should the delay on the loop detectors be 8 seconds or 10 seconds? Does an ice cream truck qualify as “heavy truck traffic” or just as an excuse for a tasty snack?

We have managed to discern that these two argue about perfect traffic design 1) because Matt likes to fire Mitch up, and 2) because both of them are passionate about traffic engineering (NERDS!). With all of this fire and passion, it recently caught us by surprise that not all of our clients know about our obsessive traffic engineers’ abilities. Admittedly, we just assumed you could all hear Matt and Mitch arguing from three counties away. Our bad.

Allan Heitbrink, our newest engineer, is heading for the NUCPS in Chicago this fall to become a (bigger) geek like Matt and Mitch. We’re hoping this somehow creates less gridlock for our phone system. More importantly, let’s hope that the EPA doesn’t get wind of the potentially higher, louder exhaust with one more traffic engineer squawking about side-street queues.