Engineers Week: Meet an engineer who works in the Traffic Design Section

When you drive down a highway and notice the placement of a green exit sign, or the lane striping on the concrete, or even arrows that help direct you into certain lanes — those are all design aspects of the highway that are carefully crafted for your safety. 

Kerry Wilcoxon, the state traffic engineer who runs the Traffic Design Section, and his team are responsible for making those decisions and ensuring the recommendations that come out of planning and road safety analyses are enacted through signing, striping and roadway design changes that make highways safer and easier to use. 

“My job is to make sure that everyone who’s using the road today gets to their next birthday, and they arrive to and from the place they were intending to go, get home safely in the evening, and that happens day-in and day-out,” Wilcoxon said.

Wilcoxon and his team analyze crash data and traffic patterns to design roadway improvements that benefit the traveling public. 

“We want to make sure that every project we work on ends up safer than the configuration we have today,” Wilcoxon said.

For example, years ago, when Wilcoxon was working as the state traffic safety engineer, a Road Safety Audit had recommended adding an extra lane on a stretch of the Loop 101 Price Freeway northbound in Tempe to help alleviate capacity issues. 

Later, when that section of highway was slated for a pavement improvement project, Wilcoxon and his team realized there was an opportunity to implement some of the recommendations that came from the audit. He collaborated with Traffic Safety, the Roadway Design Group, Central Regional Traffic Engineering Office and the Central District to brainstorm a plan. 

“We were able to come up with a way to fit the additional lane into the segment that was being re-striped in such a way that it wouldn’t be too disruptive to either the construction project or the sections of Loop 101 north or south of there,” Wilcoxon said. 

That improvement was completed last year and the effect was “pretty immediate.” Wilcoxon said in areas where there had been congestion, traffic was flowing better. And there was a more uniform speed across all lanes, so fewer vehicles were trying to switch into a faster moving traffic lane. 

And seeing that positive change is highly rewarding. 

Wilcoxon loves his job as an engineer because it allows him to apply math to real world problems. At the end of the day, he tasks himself with the job of making the roads better and safer than he found them at the beginning of the day.

“I really want to make sure I’m having an impact as much as possible, and that ultimately, when I’m done with my career,” he said, “I can look back and say ‘I made the roads safer and there’s people alive today that wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been on duty.’”