Professional Engineer · Los Angeles
Traffic engineering
& the software behind it
I'm a licensed PE doing traffic engineering and public policy for the City of Culver City managing everything in the public right-of-way, and I build the tools the work keeps asking for.
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Selected work
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The Public Post
Active A civic transparency service that tracks public meetings across the LA/OC metro and sends a personalized weekly email digest. Agendas are gathered from dozens of city sources, deduplicated, and filtered down to the jurisdictions each subscriber actually follows. Next.jsTypeScriptFastAPI MongoDBCloud Run the-public-post.com -
Sidewalk & Driveway Repair Tracker
Active A defect tracker that sits behind an existing municipal repair program instead of replacing it. Residents get a public map showing whether a defect is known and where it stands; staff get one backlog in place of a spreadsheet, with severity measured and recorded in the field from a phone. Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQL + PostGIS LeafletProtomaps Live public map -
Machine-Readable Vehicle Code for Automated Driving
Published 2023 Master's thesis at UCLA turning the California Vehicle Code into a machine-readable database an automated driving system can query while it drives. 290 codes were parsed into condition-and-result logic across 60 operational characteristics, with a scoring method built to grade each for legal vagueness — two thirds carried ambiguous language. GPT-4 prompting was tested as an automated conversion path, and the database was validated in simulation by adding a legality term to the vehicle's trajectory cost function. The dataset is public. NLPGPT-4Key-value database OpenCDASimulation escholarship.org · UCLA, 2023 -
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About
I'm a licensed Professional Engineer doing traffic engineering for the City of Culver City. In practice that means everything in the public right-of-way — signals, CCTV, signing and striping, curb ramps, bike and bus projects — and everything under it, from potable water and stormwater to fiber. I also write policy: curb management, parking, valet, mobility services, and encroachment permitting.
I came to it sideways. I studied mechanical engineering at Auburn, then spent three years at Holder Construction managing electrical construction on a $100M data center before going back to UCLA for a master's in transportation. Transportation planning at Santa Monica and street design at Kimley-Horn put me on the planning and consulting sides of the same assets I now manage from the city's side of the counter.
The software here comes out of that. Working inside a public agency, the recurring problem is rarely that the process is broken — it usually works — it's that the information about it is stranded in a spreadsheet, a PDF agenda, or a codebook written for humans. A tool slower than the spreadsheet it replaces gets abandoned, so I design for that constraint first and let the feature list follow.
- Role
- Associate Traffic Engineer, City of Culver City
- License
- Professional Engineer (Civil), California
- Graduate
- MS Civil Engineering — Transportation, UCLA
- Undergraduate
- BS Mechanical Engineering, Auburn University
- Based in
- Los Angeles, California
- Building with
- TypeScript, Python, PostGIS
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Contact
If you're working on something in this space — or want to talk about a project here — email is the fastest way to reach me.