CMU alumnus Todd Wilson wants to help you get around

Nearly all alumni of Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus have at least one memory in common — navigating the city’s sometimes messy tangle of streets, highways and bridges.

By the time he graduated from CMU, Todd Wilson, a Pittsburgh native, had already spent years thinking about his home city’s geography and how it influences the way its residents move around.

“The topography of Pittsburgh was just such a unique challenge,” says Todd, who graduated from the College of Engineering in 2006 with a double major in civil engineering and engineering and public policy. “When you see roads going up the side of hills, going through hills and tunnels, when you see really tall bridges, it was just so exciting — and so much more exciting than traveling in other areas.”

Todd is the lead traffic engineer at GAI Consultants in Pittsburgh, a profession for which his dual major at CMU trained him well. But that table was set many years earlier, when he followed his older brother’s interest in the city’s bridges.

“My father was a photographer and he ran a studio downtown and so when I was probably in kindergarten, he bought us cameras and drove us around and we could photograph bridges,” Todd says. “My mother was a Pittsburgh Public Schools art teacher and she encouraged us to draw bridges both by hand and on the Mac Classic computer software at the time.”

The fascination never died down. One elementary school teacher allowed Todd to teach short lessons on the types of bridges that could be found in and around Pittsburgh. And as a student at the city’s Taylor Allderdice High School, Todd had already decided on a career in engineering, but he had broader goals than just spanning Pittsburgh’s three rivers.

“I was thinking more about road alignments, interchanges — that sounded more interesting than just designing bridges,” he says. “And at that point I spent pretty much my entire life studying things in Pittsburgh, I wanted to learn more about them. I really didn't have a desire to go to another city and start over.”

He didn’t. He was accepted at CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, and chose to be a Tartan. And in short order, he took a transportation civil engineering course that taught him some specific things about what he wanted to do professionally.

“It was just seeing the difference between the theory and the practicality and getting that idea of, ‘Is this something that I can do on a day-to-day basis?’” Todd says. “Initially, I thought I would be more into being a roadway designer, but after taking that class, I thought that the application of moving flow on roadways was more interesting than designing the roadway themselves.”

There were also project-based classes throughout Todd’s time at CMU that gave him a thorough look at how the theory he was learning would be applied on Pittsburgh’s roads and highways. One course, in fact, was taught by John F. “Fred” Graham, a Carnegie Tech graduate who had by then retired from a long career as Allegheny County’s director for engineering and construction.

“He managed the Pittsburgh International Airport midfield terminal construction for Allegheny County, so his name's on the plaque at the airport,” Todd says. “That was just so interesting to learn about. You're thinking ‘An airport's an airport,’ right? But he was able to discuss with us why these decisions happened, especially in the case of the 1990s attempt at optimizing a hub experience.”

Experiences like that, along with his dual major, were helpful immediately upon entering the workforce after his 2006 graduation, he says.

“Certainly the civil engineering degree has helped just being a professional engineer and working on traditional projects, and even being able to get involved in some of the planning aspects of a project,” he says. “I feel like the engineering and public policy degree has helped because in some cases we might be looking at grant funding or how projects fit into policy and broader planning.

“For example, one of the projects I was involved in for Carnegie Mellon was the university’s master plan,” he adds. “Not only is there the whole city process and the city policies that you have to meet, but it also helps us figure out transportation demand alternatives: Should we be designing just for the car? Can we do a more multimodal approach? How can we work with those policies to take advantage of multimodal options to ultimately have more sustainable choices?”

That mix of disciplines and projects carries over to Todd’s work at GAI, which has infrastructure and energy divisions, “...and traffic touches almost everything,” Todd says.

“On a typical day, I could go from working on maintenance of traffic through a work zone to a traffic signal design to a planning study for a municipality or an institution to a safety study,” he says. “A solar farm may need construction permits or a data center may need a traffic assessment. Or if there's a utility project and the contractor has to dig up the roads. Traffic modeling, reconfiguring roads, permitting. There's just a lot of variety.”

And although GAI’s work spans western Pennsylvania and the surrounding states, much of what Todd does centers on Pittsburgh’s messy tangle of streets, highways and bridges — the ones he’s been fascinated with for most of his life.

“Pittsburgh is a really interesting area because it seems like it doesn't always make sense,” he says. “I mean, why does this intersection look like this? Why is this road here? If you start asking questions it's pretty exciting. It’s old, the terrain presented all kinds of challenges, but they figured everything out. Everything was built for a reason and then everything else was built off of that.”