News

March 2010

Dowling Staff Achieves Traffic Engineer Designation
Sacramento, CA –Associate Transportation Engineers Abishek Parikh, Chirag Safi, and Franklin Cai recently earned the designation of Traffic Engineer with the California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. They are an integral part of our Sacramento office in providing key technical support on numerous projects and we are excited to see them continue their professional growth.

Significant contributions by Mr. Parikh include:

• Managing the On-Call Traffic Engineering services for El Dorado County since the past 3 years
• Developed a city wide Traffix™ sub-model for the proposed city development to be known as Quay Valley. Forecasted the traffic volumes for traffic impact and operation analysis for Quay Valley Specific Plan.
• Developed a FREQ12 freeway model to calibrate the existing conditions and simulate future conditions of the proposed addition of a HOV lane segment for the 101 HOV lane widening project in the Santa Barbara County (Caltrans District 5).

Dowling also recognizes Mr. Safi’s role in the following projects:

• Developed a subregional Traffix™ model of the City of Rio Vista to perform an existing and future operations deficiency analysis for the City. 
• Performed freeway (basic, merge-diverge and weave) and intersection operational analyses (HCM and ICU methods and signal warrants) under both existing and future year conditions over  approximately 27.5 miles of freeway and 100 study intersections as part of the South Coast Highway 101 HOV Traffic Study for Caltrans District 5.
• Assisted with the operational analysis for the Ione Casino which spanned four counties and included 40 intersections and 22 roadway segments.  He also developed a trip generation rate for the proposed project using information from existing facilities.

Mr. Cai’s accomplishments include:

• Participated in numerous city-wide and county-wide regional modeling efforts throughout California, which include the Six-County Sacramento Area, San Francisco Bay Area, California’s Central Valley and Santa Barbara County.
• Performed network coding and land-use revision and prepared travel forecasts of the Railyards Redevelopment Project using SACOG regional traffic model SACMET.
• Developed an updated version of the Dixon model as part of the City’s general plan update.
• Prepared a traffic impact study for the proposed expansion of Lockeford Elementary School in San Joaquin County.

Aaron Elias Joins Oakland Office
Oakland, CA –We also want to extend a warm welcome to Aaron Elias, who recently joined Dowling Associates as an Associate Transportation Planner in our Oakland office.  Mr. Elias is a recent graduate with a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Florida, where he concentrated his thesis on roundabout modeling. His thesis focused on modeling roundabouts in CORSIM and comparing their approach delay, average queue, and maximum queue with two operational roundabouts .

Mr. Elias also assisted in the development of the new interchanges chapter for the 2010 Highway Capacity Manual under the NCHRP Project 3-60: Validation and Enhancement of the Highway Capacity Manual’s Interchange Ramp Terminal Methodology.
He also led the data collection efforts in the field for NCHRP 3-60A.Since joining Dowling Mr. Elias has worked on the development of highway capacity manual methodologies to assess advanced traffic management strategies that influence traffic demand.