“Where we are today with policies and ideas that inform safety performance and active transportation is exciting and inspiring.”
We’re an interconnected nationwide team, but we each have our own reasons for being passionate about the work we do. This month, get to know Andy Daleiden, senior principal engineer in our Boise office.
Read the transcript:
Where we are today with policies and ideas that inform safety performance and active transportation in our communities is exciting and inspiring.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned since I started in the transportation industry 25 years ago is how much community is involved in helping make decisions and solutions related to transportation. Once you get into the industry and see how much our projects have an influence in a community, then you also see how important it is to engage in the community on those projects.
As engineers, we can sit in a room and understand the problem and then solve that by applying a lot of different engineering principles to get to the end product, but that doesn’t necessarily mean at the end that the community is going to be happy with that. So it’s really neat to flip that and go, “What does the community want what? What ideas do they have?” And let the community come and bring those ideas, and then us as engineers we test them. Through that process you can hopefully get interest and buy in on the on the project from the community and in the end see that project move forward.
I have a family, my wife and two daughters, and I enjoy spending time with them. I spend time shuttling my daughters to their different activities in the afternoons, so we experience transportation whether that’s walking, biking, or I’m driving them to wherever that activity is. They get to hear a little bit of what I do and what that means to them related to the transportation system. We bike from our house to downtown Boise or to the Boise River on 11th Street, which has a raised bike facility, and they get excited about going on that facility when we get there. They know we were involved in it as a company, but also just that it used to not be that way and it’s a lot better now.
Everybody experiences transportation on a daily basis and it influences their quality of life, so that component of just being able to be connected with people and help communities out in terms of getting folks from A to B in a safe manner excited me and has kept me in the industry.