My experience

Overview

I mainly did work in two areas: - Traffic Design: I would be given 1-3 intersections per week that a member of the public had submitted a complaint for. I would go out to the intersection itself and evaluate it based on their complaint (usually for sight distance and/or signage) and determine if the intersection was adequately designed and signed. I would then take my results and meet with a member of my team to discuss the results and determine what changes, if any, needed to be made to the intersection. If changes needed to be made, I would write up a work order in Bentley MicroStation for those changes and send it to the maintenance department for the changes to be made. - Traffic Analysis: Every so often over the course of my internship, I was given a corridor of multiple intersections (all signalized) that was having traffic issues to analyze traffic flow on. I would take the intersections given and model them in Synchro 10 and then input all traffic counts available to determine the distrubution of traffic. After that, I would run an optimization to determine the best cycle lengths for each signal and run a simulation to look at the traffic flow between the intersections. I would then manually optimize the cycle phase lengths and coordination with other intersections to get traffic to flow as smoothly as possible, and I would send the results to our traffic signal engineer to get the timings inputted into the signals. This work was usually done with the assistance and additional opinion of our traffic signal engineer and my supervisor.