Nice Profile of Chief Traffic Engineer in the Seattle Times

Today's Seattle Times Front Page

From the Seattle Times:

Seattle isn’t building many new streets these days. Chang, along with dozens of engineers and technicians, works to make the streets we have function better, rejiggering speed limits and lane lines, trying new ideas to make the streets more welcoming and more efficient.

The results, like them or not, are apparent: Seattle’s not getting easier for drivers anytime soon. But it’s one of the safest cities in the country for pedestrians. And while downtown neighborhoods have added 45,000 jobs in the last six years, the rate of drive-alone commuters has declined, and transit use has spiked....

...the Seattle Department of Transportation has changed the signal timing on dozens of traffic lights throughout the city to give pedestrians a jump start.

“It’s really about making our city more livable,” he said. “We don’t want people to get to the destination as fast as possible, we want our streets to be efficient, and sometimes efficiency is actually going slower”....

“A longstanding city traffic engineer can really be the one holding back better design for people,” said Dale Bracewell, the manager of transportation planning for Vancouver, B.C. “Dongho is really one that’s embraced the new way, that we want to be thinking about all types of transportation, a less car-centric view.”