Kaizen Blueprint

Aldosius Chandra (00:00)
Dan, welcome to the show. are you, bud? Good. Thanks for having me. Awesome. I wanted to start off and ask you one question. Sure. What do you do and how is that important in life? What do I do for money? What do I do my free time? For money? Sure. So I'm a civil engineer by education from Temple University. And specifically what I do is I do transportation engineering, mostly leaning towards traffic engineering, which I can.

Bug you about later. Yeah. And why is that important on everyday life? well, what's the last time you were stuck in traffic? a couple yesterday. Actually, yeah. Where we stuck in traffic was the highway or a local road. Definitely a highway. There you go. Yeah. I mean, this weekend is, you know, Labor Day weekend. This is one of those weekends just like in this part of the world. We're living like Philly, New Jersey area. Tons of people going from, the city to the shore back again.

Anything from you know the streets outside of this building right here how the intersection works as far up as How do you have thousands of vehicles passing the same point? you know hour after hour after hour in different weather or conditions or You know condition of the driver Yeah, and make that all flow and then I work on an element increasingly Which is asking a question. How do you make it flow safely? Mm -hmm, not just for one person but for most of them

Because most people when they think about traffic or transportation We've been geared as professionals, but also it's just people in general to think about how do I get from a to be as fast as possible, right and in general as time is going on as Places like say Philly have gotten denser more people living in city areas rather than suburbs You get these problems where people? Experience questions like am I safe doing this? Is there a level of stress that I experienced as being a bicyclist on the road?

or going out for a morning jog and I have to compete with a vehicle going at like 50 miles an hour down that road outside. So it's a fun, it's a fun little complicated world to live in. And the more I do it, the more I like it. So, how do you calculate like how, if it makes sense for a particular road or a particular like, like for example, right, we have places in Los Angeles when there's six, maybe 10 lanes at a given highway. And in Philly here, we have three or four.

know, 95 just have five now. Does that make it easier for someone to drive? Does that make the traffic less? Or does that make it even more because now, okay, there's more lanes, so more people sway into going to that highway? That's a great question. Not to dive too far back in history, but the question you're asking is what people, you know, almost a century ago at this point, were asking the exact same question.

To give a little brief history, know, World War II happened and a lot of people, namely the General Eisenhower became president was like, wow, those German forces are moving around quite well with the highway, which we had kind of an interstate highway system too. These things all started happening with the Works, Products Administration, Federal Highway Administration, which today is the FHWA, which oversees a lot of DOTs, which is kind of where people like me typically do work for.

And the question that you just asked like hey man, know if I'm feeling full if I loosen my belt Can I eat some more that question has been a huge part of the story of at least American civil engineering transportation engineering for the better part of our Modern car history. Mm -hmm at least from the 50s forward and that question has been asked in increasingly quantitative ways since the 1950s even before that really The short answer your question that you

That's pretty well. No, it does not help. What you're referring to is something called induced demand, which the idea is like, I have four lanes of traffic. It's pretty crowded. I'm gonna loosen the belt. I'm gonna add a fifth lane or a sixth lane.

For a very short time, does somewhat alleviate the congestion. Over enough time though, maybe not a year, but maybe several years or at least a decade or so, induced demand is that you are changing the behavior of the people using the system. in this case, they begin again using it more. And that takes effect in a lot of ways. Philadelphia, we're both at as we're recording this is a phenomenal example to discuss it. Because we have freeways, which people usually call highways.

We have highways, which are things like say Broad Street or the Roosevelt Boulevard, which are at grade, we would say at level, and they have different intersections and all that. But it changes because the thing about at least engineering is that, you know, if you if I drop this water bottle, it'll drop with the same way, the same speed, the same mass and acceleration. It'll drop the same way here as if it would do in London or in Beijing, because that's

basic physics, right? When you're building material, it's people driving a car or riding a bike. People in London don't have to be like people in Philly, and people in Philly don't have to be like people in, Beijing. So if you apply the notion that, if we make the belt looser, the highway wider, people will logically have more space on it. It doesn't necessarily hold true, because the people you're building it for and with react in their own independent and sometimes chaotic ways.

Yeah. Does it make sense for governments to just build more highways and freeways so that people could just? If you look at the way a lot of things are funded, would think they think that. increasingly, in my opinion, we're lucky to be living through a time when people are really creatively assessing. That's probably not been the case, and we should probably try something else.

95 that we're both experienced with a lot of people in the nation experience 95 or a lot of other highways like it You know, what if you can move even a quarter of those people via some other method transit, whatever else have you and Not have that amount of real estate dedicated to highway space. What would you do with the space you got back? Could it be houses could be businesses could be a new community? Well, it could at least not be a maintenance fee or construction fee

So people are increasingly getting curious about if this ultimately doesn't work, right? If four lanes didn't work, then six lanes isn't working. we live in LA. We'll try 10 lanes. that's not even working for somewhere in Texas. And this isn't working. People are, you know, at different levels, naturally kind of losing steam on the idea that like, all right, we're going to add a 12th lane. We're going make this a 20 lane highway.

No one really takes that seriously. There's no real reason that you would think so. Yeah. So people are becoming more and more curious about, there's so many other places in the world. You know, we don't necessarily have to become Amsterdam or Tokyo or whatever, but if someone has a good idea, can we steal a bit of it? Or can we at least use the knowledge that we've had for quite a while that we've never really acted on? Yeah. What's hard about engineering is that at least this kind of piece of it is

It's very easy to explain to you or me or anyone why you don't want this building to fall on your head. Everyone gets that feeling immediately. I don't want to get collapsed on. But when you tell people, hey, you know, your quality of travel of being the traveling public could be different or better anyway. But you'll have to maybe be more amongst other people or do something that is at this time uncomfortable or novel to you. Again, you're building your most critical building material.

is not the asphalt or the concrete or the pavement striping. Your unique building material is the people that you would make the system for. Which is why, even though really I'm only competent to make some basic calculations and draw plans, you get into this kind of weird, nebulous field where issue at hand can be helped and informed by engineering and planning as well, but ultimately it's a people issue. So a lot of times,

my curiosity, but also my hesitancy is that just because I went to college for a thing doesn't make me a spokesperson for it necessarily. Just like you can go to college for whatever. Yeah. Your experiences encompass every single person. Certainly not. So at least in my youngish engineering career so far, definitely taking perspective of the people living in the places where you want to make your grants changes is increasingly a thing I consider and think about because I'm never going to know enough.

Is that why you wanted to go into civil engineering? that's a question. I went into civil engineering so that I could just avoid being bothered by my parents. That's the answer to that question. I did not want to study or do anything serious. Okay. And so if you say, so you graduate high school and you say, I'm going do engineering and you know, you have like two years of gen eds, like math and science or, know, whatever, and you know, you can put off actually thinking about your career.

From 18 to 20, that's phenomenal. And I got to be lazy that way. I say that jokingly. Obviously I recommend that to necessarily people, but you know, for me, I've been lucky in a way because looking back at it now, we look back at our lives and it looks like there's an author writing with a pen that's very deliberate. But at the time it looks very chaotic and random. That was my perspective then. Speaking of you sitting here now, I see the 12 year old me playing SimCity.

And I see the 30 -ish year old me doing this right now. Well, yeah, yeah. Kind of doing the same game this time, more seriously and for money, right? Yeah. But if you had caught me at like 22, it's like, well, I'm a college dropout, drop into community college, matriculate to a local college, which is doing really well in Philly now. Temple. And really...

Come to this.

I've been delighted to find out that I've been able to make money doing something I actually do love versus something that like... So what pushed you in terms of what kind of shift the gear there or flip the switch of like, okay, I dropped out, but then now I'm pursuing something that I would have thought I enjoyed back then and now I enjoy too. Like looking back now, what made you that change of, okay, now I'm going to pursue something?

Well, first off, I want to thank you for the question because this is obviously going to be a free therapy session for me. That's great. It's awesome. mean, I'm keeping a real deal. mean, you know, in that interim between I dropped out and came back to community, my mom passed kind of suddenly and, you know, sobered me up in some in several ways. And when I came back, I kind of had a determination to make it make it right for my parents, if nothing else.

Still didn't love the things I was doing. was just like, let pass. Let me pass this class. And as I got into it, really, found a way to find my tribe, like friends I still have today. And it sounds funny, but man, like there's so many classes I studied hard for so that I could become a reliable source for them to cheat off of. And vice versa, by the way. That's not good friendship. OK. There's a reciprocity. OK. Well, thing is, anyone who's been a STEM major of any kind or whatever else,

Anything with at least one math class in it knows that it's a collaborative cheat and is a sincere and good, you know, it's where I talked to like young hires a day and it's like, you know, the phrase where it's like, all right, take my homework, but make it look different. Do not try this at school. But it's kind of funny because like today, if a new hire came to me and I was like here, you have to do this task. Here's how I did it the first time by all means, take how I did it, but think actively as you're doing it.

Because if you can get 70 % of the way of this kind of done off understanding, more or less, and the 30 % you're completely unclear about, that's phenomenal. That's more than halfway there. Collaborative effort. But in any case, I commute to campus, so every day taking the train, sometimes driving, but taking the train mostly, the classes you take, whether it's structural design,

or water resources or just basic physics. I kept looking at the train window and thinking, I understand like a very tiny piece of this just a little bit more than it is today. And that is kind of cool. I do feel something fun with that. A recurring theme is like, if you want to go into engineering, you to be good at math and science, have to like math and science. I'm a little, practically speaking, that is good advice. But personally,

Rather, think that it's a bit of... you like, if you're interested in the world around you, as you walk around it, that's probably the more interesting question. Because once you determine that you like it you're invested in it, you can choose to apply yourself and learn. So there's like three themes that I just heard from what you just said that kind of trigger that point of view.

going to where you are today. One is that big event that causes you to, okay, I gotta change myself up here. One is the death of your mother, sorry to hear that. Number two is that you gotta stay accountable to your friends in that STEM class. And then number three, you start applying the things that you learn on a daily basis, whether you're taking the train or driving a car, you're just looking at things and you're like, okay, I understand a little bit. You start implementing and you start.

putting things together, you start learning and connecting things around you and that kind of push you even further into, now I want to pursue this. Yeah, and to be frank, by the time I got my degree, I wasn't joining the class, so I the topics. I was doing it not just to pass anymore, I was doing it for the energy of it. And even then, man, saying stuff on camera, I'm not even saying to myself, but I took a lot of classes really because

My dad being a structural engineer, I leaned into structural classes. like, gonna show him can do this. Collaborative effort with your dad. I'm gonna show him I can do this, you know what mean? I'll go from being the dropout to the kid who took the advanced elective and whatever, structural dynamics, whatever. So I graduated with a course list and resume that kind of looks like a certain way. Get a job appropriate to it. And two and a half years into that, my first job, which I had an excellent employer and someone who was...

fired up about what they do. Every day coming to work, I was like, man, I'm not fired up about this thing the way that person is. And that person is not younger, senior engineering, all that. And I was like, I want to be a person like that, but I'm not seeing it here. And I was like, I had this wild notion where I was like, hold on, I have a degree, I could technically do anything with it. What would I do with it? If I was just thinking, because I just I hate to do stuff for my own sake, because then I to be accountable for it.

It's easier. I think it's the answers because that's my tick. But but when you do stuff like because you do this because you get a good income and you do this because you get good stability and this job sector is growing and aren't you smart for finding that those are all things you explain to yourself and you tell your friends and your family I'm doing this because I'm gonna be a successful young person when you say I'm doing this because I just I can't get my I can't get this topic out of my head.

then you take accountability for it and then you're very open to people's speculation. And part of me for growing up has been getting serious enough for myself to lean into that. Got it. Because two and a half years in my first job, which is when I switched to my second, which is really where my growth path really started and accelerated.

You know, that notion of do what you love has a lot of elements that are true and some that are maybe unhelpful. But I had a kind of sober like realizing slowly over time that if you don't do what you love, eventually you're going to be doing that thing and run into someone who's doing it for a reason that they love it. If you only do things for only rational reasons, you will eventually climb high enough. You've met someone who meets.

who's doing them for not entirely quote unquote motivated or rational reasons. And then you cannot compete with those people. And really personally, you can't enjoy something that's occupying over 2 ,000 hours a year of your life, assuming you 40 hours a week. But that's difficult, right? mean, you, the wording of do what you love is very difficult, especially for a young person. So how do you?

figure out the things that you love. What would you recommend for someone who is maybe in college or maybe in high school now, you hear that all the time. That's always like the quote, right? Do what is your passionate about or do what you love. How do you go about finding that? I mean, you know, it's kind of like, this is not my analogy. I've heard this other places, but, you know, we all go to the same carnival or the arcade and

If you've got a lot of quarters in your pocket You can try as many games as you like if you only got one or two quarters in your pocket You have to try a game and hopefully win it and be good at it the first or the second time So kind of blithely telling people do what you love It comes from a place of maybe well -being but also comes from a place of privilege sometimes sure Sometimes you don't have opportunity. You got to be really good at something the first time or otherwise You're in debt from a college and you're not gonna climb out. Yeah

And sometimes you just pick a STEM major because you know, you need the money to pay off that But point is like Doing what you love on the positive side is not just a feel -good -about -it kind of advice it's also very strategic advice because when you do things you do like They talk they tend to have like an upward spiral as opposed to a downward spiral bad habits as an upward spiral where like I can't get this idea. I'm having like man like I'm learning about

You know, traffic and transportation engineering issues. my wife's ingestion issues and that. then you see a thing on Facebook about someone's talking about, the Roosevelt Boulevard subway. And you're like, that's so cool. I'm to go. I don't care. It's a Saturday morning topic. I'll go because that's interesting as a person. It's a Philadelphia, but also professional. And then it starts to ricochet and you meet people who are also a little bit weird like you in that way. And it's that upward spiral. So when you do the thing that you do feel charged up about.

Maybe not like a hundred percent love but like 90 % love even that can be really helpful and I think You know if we had an 18 year old here in the room right here. I Would just probably not try to use such absolutist language just because you don't love something a hundred percent doesn't mean you don't love it 90 % and Just because you're unsure doesn't mean you have to become very sure. Yeah

Which makes sense, right? I think the do what you love, it's a temporary motivation. It's how can I find the things that I love? And one of the first thing is taking action. As you mentioned, you start doing stuff and sometimes you start filtering out the things that you don't like, right? Or you just pursue the strength that you have success in. For example, if you are someone who is extroverted and

Perhaps you network a lot and have a great group of friends or maybe have a great group of network. You don't know whether you're going to be good at sales, for example, a realtor. But then let's say you're just starting out as an executive assistant to a top realtor in the city. Right now you're like, OK, now I'm start talking to two different clients for.

my boss and I figure I'm really good at talking to people, but I'm not really good at doing the numbers. So let's just go out there and then meet people, go to networking events, golfing clubs, things like that. And now, OK, now I really find what I really love talking to people. And then you can monetize that through other things. And it's kind of like just take our normal friendships. How much music or food or movies or just anything that you like?

If you remove the influence of your friends from it, you would never have heard about it. Right. It's ridiculous. You'd be living on an island. You can apply that same basic notions of friendship and society and social socializing to your professional realm as well. Right. Because if I live my life as fast as I can, but only me at a time, I will never catch up with, like, say, Aldo, who may chose to go out and network with any year, maybe 20, 30 or 40 or 50 people. Yeah. Because.

You know, you don't have to divide their entire life story. But when you surround yourself with people who are a little, you know, have that contagion of excitement or interest and curiosity, again, it's an upward spiral and ricochets. Yeah. Yeah. the network is really huge. Surrounding yourself with like minded individuals can greatly affect of what you do too. Yeah, it's like, you know, I don't know if followed more sports or athletic stuff or video games or whatever else. I'm a big music guy.

Like, why do I know so many musicians? Cause I like music. And if you think you like something, the easiest litmus test for finding it out is hang out people who already do like it. You know? So if you were an 18 year old, you're right here like asking, thinking to themselves, I like this thing or that thing. Go hang out with the people who already do and then see how you feel afterwards. Got it. That's awesome. I want to shift gear here and ask you more of the civil engineering stuff. You mentioned about.

SimCity, I do enjoy SimCity and, you know, building the city from the ground up. How are you doing that today with the, with your kind of your expertise? so, mean, well, so SimCity basically is like game of, know, we have a lot, but not infinite amount of land uses, right? Like basic things like hospital fire station, you know, trash center, but also entertainment district things.

And then the game is really one on the way that you space and connect them. Right. Any given sandbox or any scenario or any campaign, whatever else. At least for me, and I'm there's a million SimCity players out on on Reddit who could contradict me. But like there's other games like it. The challenge of the game becomes you have only the space of, this table. Sure. Here's your city. This cool land use is here. That cool land uses there. If they're

Too far separated. They don't interact with each other. All right, so bring them closer, but now you brought them closer. So now it's trade -offs. Yeah now this thing won't happen. So it's really a game of time and space and connection and that's really all that City building or world building in general is as a civil engineer You don't look at the whole game of that necessarily you'll be looking at one specific piece of it. You know like I mean

Very few people I would imagine walking off and say, let me consider the entire city today. You work on teams. You know, you're one piece of a team. That's the best way to be because a team is fun to work on. And why should a city be left in the fate of one mind? That's Robert, like Robert Moses or Ed Bacon back in the day or whatever else in my corner of the world, though, the issue of connection, right, is where I focus. There are engineers and people in general, developers.

Structural who make a and build be right but a and B are only meaningful if you can get to and from it. Mm right So how do you do that in the best way the safest way most usable way? That's our question again. So For me like the the thing that got me to Sim City, which actually my dad complimented me on back in the day I remember because I was in a future city competition, which is a great thing for what is that?

Future City is basically like you would use SimCity to like plan out your city, use the scores and metrics of the game to say if the city concert is working, and then you'd write about it kind of qualitatively and then make more or less like not diorama, but a physical representation of it. And you present it for competition and it still goes on today. So how do you win? You're evaluated by a panel of judges and the judges are typically like actually people I work with or work with.

I participated back when I was a kid in eighth grade and actually we won an honorable mention award from a transportation firm, which I probably should have thought more about as a kid. Yeah, because it indicated I should have gone into the first time. Yeah. Well, what I was trying to get at is what makes a city great. Like based based on based on the like the judges and the panels, let's say you have the set city and you build in a certain way. What makes it a great city? Is it the land you have a

good distribution of where the residents are and a workstation and it's a quick transportation. Unfortunately, there's no one to answer that question. No one thing makes the city great. know, mean, say we're in Philadelphia right now. I love the city, but objectively there's many things that we would all wish to change about it. know, this piece of road is flooding. This piece of the community is maybe crime -ridden or has issues with other health concerns. This part is just terrible traffic.

This part they party too loud in, you know, a great city can still have objective problems with trade offs. Sure. But in that competition, or at least in the SimCity world, at least like a lot of it would be how much money does your city generate? Which again, as human beings, we don't think about that. I'm not saying that's actually the most critical concern. Yeah. But by no means. Right. But an interesting thing that are reflected on as I get older is I think about

There was never any parking lots in the game ever. And I discovered this as I got older was that for the game makers, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, to make the game function. They originally had the idea of parking lots in it and realized a lot of their assumptions about connectivity would fall apart if they had so much surface parking. And so what essentially happens when you're playing SimCity is that if you make a building for a hundred people, there's a fake imaginary, you know,

Storage space for the hundred people's cars underneath underneath the building which obviously you don't do them real life, but that Problem they ran to is so interesting because that's a real problem that cities run into all the time Yeah, there's so many people like urban planners making phenomenal GIS maps of here's all the footprint square feet square yards of surface parking in the city downtown's what if you could remove even a Quarter of it and again make it housing or businesses or whatever

How could you change the fabric of a place? Yeah So these are the things you start asking a question like as simple as How do I make sure the water drains from the crown of the road into the gutter? How do make sure the sidewalk is sloped so that water doesn't accumulate on over ever?

How do I make sure the intersection timing is such that's a more immediate day to day job question. Yeah. But at large we all tackle these questions of how does the city work as a overall fabric. You know and no one discipline no one person only does that alone. Got it. To secure his question. So if based on your own research and perhaps places that you ever visited which city do you have do you think have the best infrastructure.

I've asked quite people the exact same question actually a lot of urban planners and you tend to get I've heard Barcelona a few times Barcelona. Okay. Yeah, Amsterdam like every planning company like you know, someone's like, you got to go to Amsterdam or you track to whatever else These are actually touted as like the top places for a lot of reasons because they're so multimodal and there's so much such a good balance of walking biking and Safe but efficient, you know car traffic

Great question. would, I would love to try out like kind of more a mix of European cities in general. Some places in Asia like Japan, some places have phenomenal ideas and things are implementing. you and I have chatted about before when the world cup comes here, you'll have a huge mass entertainment event and a lot of people there will be used to a different transportation system compared to 95. Yeah. And I'm really excited as a

person but also as a professional.

to see what feelings and sensations come from that. Yeah. You know, how we change our city after that. Yeah. I mean, I've been to Japan and I've been to Amsterdam and they're pretty much really great walkable city. And something that's great about Japan is that the subway system is always clean. It's it's on time and the people are obviously in the right attitude of waiting in line as opposed to it's like, you have people just running into it. I feel as though

In the city where you can have a great infrastructure, great rules, great transportation systems, it's all based on the people to follow the rules and make sure that it's safe. The people are your unique building material. Exactly. That's the variable, right? This house, the same wooden concrete, again, can be built with the same physical principles, no matter where we go on the planet. Building codes aside.

But again, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, if you have a culture that, for X, Y, or Z reason, sees taking the train as their main mode, their attitudes reflect it, and because their attitudes reflect it, the people who design it, which are the more immediate engineers and planners, have different kind of building options in a way. And we're here though. We're in America, we're in this case in Philly. People here...

It's unreasonable to ask them, become suddenly like the people in Amsterdam. That's not going to happen. That's human beings. And this is where it gets interesting because nominally people like me, or at least tangential to me, design these systems. This doesn't make us psychologists, people who should pontificate about why this or that. We can quantify, we can provide objectivity for things that are objectively ascertainable. But is there any way you can enforce it based on the...

based on your studies, analytics, things like that. Well, you wouldn't want to enforce it. You would want people to do it out of their choice and out of their reasoning. The thing though, over time is that you don't have to enforce it. There's a reason and I say this anecdotally, but like there's a reason that if it was Friday night or Saturday night or date night, whatever, you're probably going to choose to go to a place just pedestrian friendly, walkable, well built, well designed.

not kind of monolithic and overarching, but rather brings you into it. There's a reason that they're like, north of this area, places like new town or peddler's village or new hope, or places like in Jersey, like Princeton that are considered great date places. Same thing in certain parts of downtown Philly. You would never be like, we should.

We should find whatever like restaurant is by like exit this or that of 95. I keep using that advice. Shout out to 95. But, or like you'd never be like, man, it's a day night. Let's, let's, let's find whatever's nice and long, like I semi six or like Roosevelt Boulevard. That doesn't really happen. You don't really need to enforce it per se. People, people are people. How do you enforce it in disguise of autonomy? that's a question. Well, it's incentives, right? You let you create things in a way that,

Like say for example, the reason a lot of folks don't like transit here is because perceptions and notions of safety or not safety, which is a completely fair thing to bring up. Who wants to be the place where you're not safe? Sure. I don't. But then there's the objective data that we can say, we can say, X, Y, Z is improving. X, Y, Z is getting worse, whatever else. And then there's doing it enough that you shift attitudes. man.

I would suggest this though as an interesting point of view. If someone were to look up rates of driver licenship over the past 30 years, they're not going up, they're going down and they're going down a little bit sharply.

So there's less people with driver license. Yes Why that is and is that new drivers or existing drivers new drivers new basically? Yeah, so the statistic is something of the nature of like say in 1990 You know your average 17 year old who had a license was like in this percent now today. It's a good bit lower Yeah, why is that? mean you can say maybe it's money. Maybe it's cars. Maybe it's a lot of things, right? But at any rate, we do know there are less young people driving

We also do know that, mean, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, certainly, you didn't see any e -scooters or e -bikes. That's true. on. If you have more options, you might do more things. So as your notions of how I get myself from A to B change, the people in our seats have to ask ourselves, what is it about the systems we're doing?

Are we making a system that can accommodate all these and then hopefully grow in a healthy way? Or are we over prioritizing only one mode of transportation? I think that that comes with the economy as well where you have the younger people are what I call the delay The delay generations they delaying the the marriage. They're delaying buying a house, right? Yeah, they're delaying going to university maybe because they don't have enough funding sure things right now are very expensive so as a result we would just

Want to live near the school and sometimes you get out apartment out of school, right? And you you know this living in downtown Just knowing downtown Philadelphia and apartment itself. It costs 200 to 300 dollars just for a parking spot in your apartment buildings however, since we have the mode of transportation of buses trains or trolleys or the ebikes that you just mentioned or indigo, right? Yeah, just local local bikes. Yeah, so people are they rather just have

a good location where everything is there in terms of supermarkets, fitness studios, just activities or restaurants in general, as opposed to buying a car because having a car costs a lot, Yeah. Car insurance, which are continuously increasing. You have maintenance, you have gas. They rather just remove all that, live in a really good location and then just be around. Obviously work from home plays a factor too. You don't have to drive as much and get Uber.

get Uber Eats, Walmart Plus, get groceries to your house. That's why this is such a just a cool time. I'm lucky to be doing what I'm doing. It's like I feel like I'm doing what I'm doing. Honestly, the time where Gold Rush is not the right word, because that's not what it is. Rather like these these narrow streets here were considered the hyper undesirable like when I was a kid. Now, like this is some of the one of the most fun areas of Philly. You know,

So whether it's cost, you can, maybe someone says themselves, I can always get more money or maybe they're just lucky I'm born in a motorway or else you can't get more time. You're always losing the time. And if you present an option where it's like, you could do this commute in a 35 minute train or a 70 minute car ride, people would probably take the train on that. if that was the only criteria, or if you spell it out to them, your chances of having a severe or fatal accident or crash, not accident.

Crash. I'll go into that in a second. Is much higher driving than taking transit. That's also a really big concern, not just for individuals, but for municipalities. if you're the say the city of whatever and you say, this percent of my, you know, tax paying citizens will have a pretty bad or a fatal crash. That's at a human level is tragic. From a city's point of view, that's also.

Money, they're never gonna see yeah, you know yeah, so there are practical concerns which again is why It's kind of like zoom in on this the question of how can I? Not be in a traffic jam that's been asked for at least since the 1950s But the question of how can I not die in traffic? Quantitatively speaking has really only been aggressively asked since about 2010. Why is that? because it's hard to quantify if If we say

Here's your four lane intersection. And there's cars coming from all these directions. There's a traffic signal. It has a certain timing. OK, and you can optimize that timing. That's true. How can I make sure the intersection flushes out cars and travels things as best as it can? Right. That question is getting into it now. Was starting to be asked in the thing called the Highway Capacity Manual starting around 1950.

Because it's a normal question. Imagine if you're the mayor of the city and you hire me to make you some roads or a new neighborhood, right? New neighborhood of houses with new roads. And you tell me, Dan, well, how well will come up? My system will shut down. Will be bad. And I say, no idea. You would never hire me. Yeah. So that's why we've been so good at quantifying flow and capacity. Right. Kind of like the flow of this water out of the bottle. Yeah. I make the opening water or not.

But questions of like are you safe? What are the chances you're gonna have a fender better today versus die in traffic today? Yeah crash That's really hard actually from a quantitative objective perspective to get into because What do you do? Do you look at police crash records? That's one way but then you're biased towards historicity, right? Do you look at systemic characteristics the railway typology?

That's useful because you're being proactive, but then you need a lot of data to kind of normalize it and have a good empirical background of it. Do you really combine it? So the highway capacity manual asks questions of flow and movement. And it's been around for three quarters of a century, right? Yeah. But the highway safety manual, which is these are just publications, manuals, things created out of tons of research.

has only been around since 2010 and its next edition, the second will probably come out only next year or so. But the more that Mayor Aldo can ask a question about not just how fast can people move around my little city, how safely can they move around, not just because that matters at a human level, but again, who wants to live in your city if it's that dangerous to be living in it from a travel perspective. The more we quantify that, the more the infrastructure owner

is pretty curious about it. Again, as Philadelphians, there were some pretty bad bicycle and pedestrian fatal crashes this past month. You probably heard about them. And that became a huge issue.

that at a political level, I'm not necessarily an expert on these things. But if a city government chooses to act on it, that will become some engineers Monday morning problem. know, speaking of problems, we have crashes, have accidents, things like that. Thank you for saying crashes, by the way. Not that I'll not that I'll go into it, but my boss would not accept this if I didn't say this. We use the word accident because we all say accident.

Our one rule, at least in my office, is crash, not accident, because accident implies there's no underlying cause. It was just pure chance. But I'm going to stop there. That's correcting me on myself, but please go on. Yeah. And in terms of enforcing traffic.

speeding cameras or speeding red light cameras, yay or nay, and also the what do call it? The speed trackers. What is it called? Speed bumps or not? The speed bumps and the ones that kind of take a picture of you go over a speed limit. well, that's part of the red light camera. yeah. Same idea. Thoughts on that? Yay or nay? From a technical perspective. Yeah, they've been showing the work.

When I was in college, when they came out, you know, as a driving person who would take the Boulevard quite a lot, was like, they're putting them right exactly where I I speed or I know I need to And now as a professional. Yeah, based on the data we have, at least in this part of the world, yeah, they're definitely working because they're working. If the criteria is to reduce reduce death and severe injuries. Yeah, they're working. Are there tradeoffs again with that?

does it create a sense of, is Big Brother watching me and stuff? People feel that, and I'm not gonna say that they're wrong or right to feel it. You're a person, right? But the main idea is like, yeah, you got highways snaking through cities, and if I showed you or anyone a crash map over the last three years of any place, and you saw the red dots on it, not to be too morbid about it, but like.

You know, if we had a grave marker for every fatal and severe crash in any given major city or anywhere, you'd realize you're driving through a graveyard every single day. Yeah. And it's to be hyperbolic. I'm not saying every block of a neighborhood is like that, but definitely the major arteries of cities. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. When you're doing a GPS, when you're putting a location on a GPS and you know the routes very well.

Is it faster to take the highway if it's busy or should you take the local route that I mean, there's no one answer that question. And I like there's certainly no one answer for that question. It'll it'll change based on condition or whatever else myself. I'm very happy to trust Google Maps. They tell me to do X, Y and Z. But yeah, that's to your question, though. That's people thinking about, I changed my behavior.

because I'm trying to game the system. Like one of the issues you run through sometimes is that if we work on a bridge and we make a detour plan for it and the detour lasts for, I don't know, a year and a half, by the time the bridge is done and you reopen the road as normal, you may have changed behavior anyway. And now you have a new unique set of not necessarily large problems, but tiny problems because you've been traveling people through another route.

So yeah, people are always playing this game themselves. I do. I'm sure you do. How can I get from here to there faster? Cause man, I just got to get my things done. You know, that's, let's say, this is probably for the Philadelphia and are listening. Sure. If I want to go from King of Prussia to let's say downtown or vice versa, either way, it's going to be traffic on a 76. Should I take that or Kelly drive?

knowing that there's there's traffic lights that was where I was going with the local versus highways. But specifically that depends on the time of day, man. I mean, listen, if it's three in the morning, take 76. But what about the five if it's five, five, five, five p or the nine a You know, it's terrible. Seventy six may still win out. It depends on that given day. Sure. I'm really lucky living at a time and in an era when we can see live traffic conditions.

I actually do that when I drive. keep my map on even for places I know how to get there because I'm always a little curious to see how things change. But my rhetorical answer to your question would be if you want to get from KOP to Center City quicker. Build a better rail line and avoid that. Do you know what I mean? That's really the thing. Something was proposed, but it didn't go through. It got pretty far along and it petered out. Issues of financing is my understanding. Yeah.

Again, that's kind of the weird overarching thing. more I get into it, you know, every single one, anyone listening to this podcast, you, me, all wondering like, man, I wish I could make like a buck more. And in my case, the more I ponder on it, and this is just me editorializing, but like, you know, your take home pay in some way in this line of work is a reflection of the overall American interest in its infrastructure. Because when a bridge collapses,

Again, everyone gets what that feels like. No one will see a building fall down or see a bridge collapse. So you absolutely spend money to repair it. But when you ask creative questions, or at least out of the box questions like, hey, what if we put a subway along with a Boulevard or whatever, or from KOP, or from Reading, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, people get into questions of...

Things that, again, engineers are certainly just one of many parties to speak on it. Right. Questions of community and identity. Right. Because if you build a station here, you might change the identity of that place in ways that are good or different. You know, and some people have different attitudes about those things. I think that's it gets to a hard spot because. The trust that the word engineer, especially with licensed engineer implies is that this person will be objective and at least truthful.

although truth has different baselines, it's really hard because as professional you create attitudes and opinions, but your work that you're paid for and you're responsible to is kind of almost ideally like a doctor's to first do no harm. And in practice, that's really hard to do because any change you make may be harmful for a party you are anticipating. But that's a never -ending conversation. That's where I...

That's why I network and I want to learn from more people. Yeah, we'll talk about networking in just a bit. How does gentrification happen? If you answer that question, ask someone who's way more educated than me. But the reason you ask about it, guess, is because you're seeing it as related to transportation. Correct. I'm going to ask now. I promise you I would. I'm going to flip the question back to you for a moment just because this is something.

I talk about with colleagues of mine, different projects get initiated, like say, man, you know, let's reduce traffic. How do we do that? Let's create some bike lanes. And you probably read the same news things I do. Bike lanes do come with certain attitudes or certain results that even though they may not be quantitatively proven or not proven, you know, there's like jokes like, man, if you see that green paint going in your neighborhood, you're about to start paying more for your rent. You know, I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I honestly wish I knew.

But let me flip the question back to you for a second. As just a regular, regular dude, young dude living in the city, how do you feel about the issues of gentrification as they're affected by getting around? Can I ask you about that? How does the role of gentrification help you with getting around the city? Is that the?

Do you feel like they're connected in any way? Like, do you notice like one thing happens and then the other thing happens? absolutely. Because for example, right, and some people might not know this outside of Philadelphia, look at Port Richmond. Sure. Port Richmond and maybe in the Fishtown area.

day building so much and built an exit out of the 95 in order for people to move in and out. Exit 23. Exactly. And now you see a influx of the younger crowd just going in into different new restaurants and James Beard awards and all this fancy fancy places that people can can mingle and have conversations and network. And on top of that, now you start seeing the bike lanes now.

subway stations are getting better and cleaner and yes, there's a lot of new buildings that are involved based on that. Yes, because and again, super big disclaimer. This is more me answering as a Philadelphian, not as a professional, because I believe believe me, taking a class in structural design or in how to make a curb work does not qualify me to know the answer to these questions.

As a Philadelphia, you living through this and especially as a temple student, like we'd be hanging out in like Fishtown in like 2012 and Northern Libraries and man, it went from being this kind of quirky artist neighborhood to a different thing. Yeah, I won't. I'll stop there, which I was in Fishtown last weekend. but yeah, like. It speaks to the power of infrastructure that if you can get the infrastructure right.

A lot of land developers or landowners will be like, man, that was the trickiest part. necessarily because frankly, building a building can be pretty linear. you have good to comfort professionals, good builders, that's not the worst part. You yeah, like someone came, they built this building. so far, you know, it's not falling down. No one. Right. I hope not. That's that's, you know, takes a lot of work. But like.

Man, what if the issue was that like this street didn't exist here before that that would be a huge issue because You're touching a lot of people's stuff when you build on a parcel that you own and you bought You're the boss. Yeah, all you do is comply with some permits and get it done But when you play with like that the connectivity the a to b question Right that affects a lot of people all at once like imagine if you're this could be my project tomorrow that supposes your project on on Monday you have two miles

two miles of roadway with various driveways, half of them go to houses or apartments or a hotel or a business or a Wendy's or it could be a driveway to the Wells Fargo Center. You doing your kind of job by affecting those two miles, it's in some way affects each of them. And that if you can solve that problem, that very large one.

It's very much easier for the property owners to just say, all right, the real core issue is done. People can move in and out of the area now. Now all I got to do is to fill up it the right way. But what triggers that? Right. Working on the area. Yeah. Working on area or just think about maybe maybe Fishtown is on a smaller scale. I think about you mentioned 10 years ago or 15 years ago. 15 years ago. That was that place was a dump.

It was different. Yeah, it was absolutely different. And what triggered that? Or even we look at a bigger scale. Las Vegas, right? And it's in a city built on the desert. Yeah. But if you look, you know, years ago, it's it's it's literally what it is. It doesn't. And then now you have a different different treats of gambling and casinos and where people want to have fun. Yeah. Bigger events. Now you have to sphere. Right. Right. But

Years ago, I wanted to know in your analysis or maybe in your conversations with other urban planners, what triggers something like that to be built and chosen to have people going in and creating a entire different city? I can only speculate, although I love to speculate. Is it just fun to build a neighborhood because it has

Suppressed land values for x y and z reasons that you can probably imagine You know like I think the perspective that I that at least my colleagues and I like increasingly like, know wonder about is Again using Philly's an example There's a reason that the Main Street Expressway cuts through Chinatown, right? There's a reasons being capped today or there's a study anyway, and that's a good thing but

you know, half a century ago or three quarters century ago, people did what they thought was the best decision and it was good for some and it was harmful for others, right? We face the same challenge today where in the name of progress and growth and becoming the best Philadelphia we can be, you know, we might, there might be 10 parties involved and one or two or almost all of them might be infected.

in ways that are good and really bad. And as a professional on my side, that's exactly why I think increasingly we're becoming sensitive to the notion of what used to be called stakeholder engagement, which is like I plan a project in your neighborhood and then I hold them and then I'm being cynical here. But then I hold a meeting saying, let's have the community like, know, present the community that can come and ask any questions they want. And it's held.

you know, from a hour this to hour that and only certain community members come out because it's that time of day or who's who's free at Wednesday at like, you know, 730 at night. Yeah. When you have kids to feed or like, you know, things to get done or you're studying. Increasingly, and this is I hope a good thing, I think it's good thing. Infrastructure owners, which are usually our clients, which are cities, DOTs, authorities, whatever are.

in my opinion, getting better and better and better at interacting with the communities that they will affect. And I think that's what's critical is that whether you are talking about civil engineers or urban planners or anything else like that, we have technical tools and using those tools for a while does give us some pieces of insight, but it is one thing for me to, you know, autocad out your intersection. It is an entirely different thing for me to live where you live. Got it.

And I would hate for people to think that just because they went to a college once upon a time and then got a license once upon a time, their most competent to just determine the destiny of a neighborhood. So it's more about like the politics that's involved and what they're going to do to incentivize the builders, the engineers to come out and change the geographic location. Yeah. And it's, that's why it's so hard. That's why it's so hard to talk about because you know,

We could, there are so many professionals who work on the issue of gentrification, but yeah, if I'm working on my city, I'd like to be able to like work and do projects in the city and not get priced out of my own home, which is not an abstract thought for like a lot of my, I have friends at my level who are moving to different neighborhoods because they can't afford the rent anymore, you know, or rather they can't afford it in a responsible way, you know? And that means a lot, you know?

But I could go on about that. So I want to flip the switch and we talk about gentrification and I want to make the opposite question of that. How does the poverty level neighborhoods happen? again, way above my pay grade way. But from an infrastructure perspective, this is what I'm increasingly learning. And we all we all kind of experience this, even if we don't name it per se.

There is a role that infrastructure, or maybe the lack thereof, does have to play in communities that are underserved and left in deserts of various kinds. Things like heat islands. What is that? Heat islands, basically an area, attractive land or a block or whatever, which is hotter.

Relative to other areas around it like in Philadelphia a lot of heat islands happen in the city core a lot of them in the city core a little bit to the north and Heat vulnerability is kind of like if you have a heat island and you don't necessarily have the infrastructure that lets you combat combat it

That's why, for example, in cities like ours, we recently have a tree plan, which is a great idea, I think, to plant trees, which creates various things like cooling effects, increases the kind of carbon dioxide, oxygen kind of back and forth. Heat as in like physical heat. heat. Yeah. Yeah. Because what's going out, know, increasing literature is going out and this is not a purview of engineering or even necessarily urban planning per se, even though the urban planners are extremely good at mapping it. Yeah.

And working with that data It's also a health issue and a you know other kind of thing is Yeah, if you look in it if we were sitting here right now and this house because of where it's located What the streets like there's more heat absorbing objects. There's less trees Maybe the roadway isn't Draining correctly or any kind of other thing which can increase other problems more infrastructure is damaged because it's going through like say

not just heat, heat like freeze all things in the winter or wherever else. You have an overall deteriorated infrastructure. It changes your living environment and that can go off in ways that affect human beings in ways that again, an engineer has no competency to quantify per se. But yeah, if you travel around the world, it's not a surprise that a lot of people in...

either unhealthy or unsafe environments tend to coincide with place with a poor infrastructure. Which is why when you ask questions like, all right, we want to make people's lives better. Let's try to improve their infrastructure. It's potential that someone else will come along and say, look, they're making that area better. And the land values are kind of depreciated. Again, that's not me as an engineer. That's me as an observing person living in the world seeing that. Where do you go when the balance is

I want to make this piece of the world better. And once I do, it becomes attractive in other ways, which doesn't necessarily serve who I thought I was serving. Right. No end of that question. There's no end to that question. Yeah. So there's, it seems like there's multiple variables where there's the physical heat that people are, are again, forgotten in terms of providing funding for a better infrastructure. Yeah. And just, yeah, like in my, in my neck of the woods, which is the least,

has the least rail system in Philadelphia, right, the northeast part of the city. You know, you could say all the traffic deaths and severe accidents that we do have, and they do have, we do have quite a lot, because that's Roosevelt Boulevard in the city. Again, I'm name dropping that. You know, you might not think about that as in violence in the way you might think about gun violence or say drug violence, but it's the result of a decision that's made or not made that results in.

Every year there'll be some amount of Philadelphians who were not Philadelphians, but who die in that section of the city. Maybe they would not have died if they had option for something that was a little bit better infrastructure. Yeah. Cause infrastructure is just the built environment. You know, it's how you choose to live. If this was hundreds of thousands of years ago, we would talk about whatever forest was nice to live in. That'd be fine. We built cities so that we could make an environment that's good for us to live in, you know?

There are things like say in architecture again planning This book called like the gendered city, which is like Cities, know historically been made by able -bodied dudes. Yeah, and it goes well body dudes guys with ahead with their conventions and tastes about how Walking in a city feels like it doesn't it's not necessarily informed by you know, women It's not necessarily informed by children. Yeah, but women and children do use these streets

And so how does it feel for people who are not in that place of decision making and power? Hopefully you can, we as professionals can learn to better not just integrate but actually elevate those people in there. A good example of it is, have you heard of the ADA law? Americans with Disability Access, it's a federal, you know.

So the rights law essentially that requires people with like handicaps kind of disabled parking again wheelchair accessible exactly and and it's only about like You know just over 30 years old And that's why you see curb cuts in the street here. That's why there's always things, you know being improved that's why the city was sued in a class -action lawsuit for not having enough of them a few years ago and kind of these over to wrap up these issues of

you know, gentrification or or or vulnerability or exposure is that, you know, a lot of times from our side of it, things come down to like just budget and time and ability. My again, editorializing is that, you know, empathy is rarely a zero sum game.

And there's this effect which I'm forgetting the name of but like you create a curb cut so that somebody in wheelchair Maybe disabled veteran. Yeah can move around and move around with dignity and not have to be Escorted right or picked up and off the curb sure you do that for one kind of party But then now you've opened up for what you can have a me you kid on his bike come on in off the curb you can maybe have a Mother take her stroller. Yeah off the curb so that's it's many other yes except for one specific one and that is the best kickback at least for

personally besides the best kickback about civil engineering is to see your stuff built. UG go boost. Phenomenal. And the second nice thing is that it's a fundamentally for me anyway, socially driven project. Yeah. And that's a great way to just live is that I'm doing work for people.

Yeah, not just for the bottom line of company XYZ. That makes sense. Yeah. In terms of civil engineering, what do you see other cities or perhaps and what you're doing now in terms of technological advancement? Like, what are the things that you think is going to come up and traffic? More importantly, many. Yeah. More importantly, that we're seeing baby boomers are getting older.

And now we have kind of the gen Z's and the next generation just come on and they're more technological savvy or alphas now or gen alphas Yeah, and people are working working from home and things like that So where do you see kind of the next urban planning or just traffic in general? I? Love being asked these questions because like it implies. I have a level of knowledge Great. I that you're here I'd say that in my opinion

The most critical thing is simply the amount of data that we're able to collect, record, and distribute effectively. Like say for, again, Philadelphia Open Data, which is a website, or rather collection of websites, the amount of just raw data that you can get right now as a Philadelphian about the city of not just from a infrastructure perspective, but a lot of things, health outcomes.

Property records real estate information So much of it is public and usable that professionals like us can just move at a higher clip and make better informed choices because We have better today to do it with like every single day. I look at crash data Which is very easy honestly to work with because it's been so well organized. Hmm, you know like 30 years ago, I mean

Police officer, you know, responds to a crash site, writes a report, it goes into a paper file in the city hall. Today, every single one of those is recorded, quantified and put into an Excel spreadsheet, hundreds of thousands of columns or rows deep. And I can pick and choose what I want, extrapolate data, develop trends and give my client better points of decision making.

Are you know, that's a general wide answer. You can say that for any industry Sure, you know, but like that's so critical and because it's taxpayer funded in our case. So much of it's man Like I could if I had a laptop here I can go on the laptop and look at this exact block and tell you and show you What's happening crash wise or traffic wise here to an extent? Yeah, right. That's awesome It lets us move faster and make better and more transparent decisions

More specific to traffic stuff, transportation, electrification, big deal. AI, big deal. Really increasingly, the intersection of technology. Engineering is by definition a technology based field. Whether the technology is just a trebuchet launching a catapult thing over a wall or whatever, or today it's...

Very quickly, a civil engineer will work with an electrical engineer, with a software engineer. Maybe not like hand in hand, but their products touch each other. So now it'll be, next time you take Broad Street or whatever, those traffic lights used to be, decades ago, would have been either isolated, which doesn't say they were like little islands to themselves. Over time, they had better sensors and whatnot. Today, because our computing technology is better,

You can drive the entire Broad Street and at least for certain corridors of it have adaptive signal systems that are talking to each other or rather a program to say, I'm getting a lot of demand here. Yeah, I'll adjust through the corridor for this length and you have a better traffic experience certainly than you would have, you know, without the technology. Got it. So, yeah, the more you see, the more you see like data technology, just absolutely like just again, speaking plainly as a civil engineer with a bachelor's degree.

Man.

I don't know if I should get a master's in engineering or should I get a master's in electrical engineering or a master's in data science? There's so much there. It's changing rapidly. And frankly, it's a big tent. You can probably get one. It doesn't matter which one you pick. You'd find someone who can use your skill set. Yeah, absolutely. I want to shift gear and ask about networking. That's how that's how we met. Right. That's right. Yeah, we shared it in networking. What are your tips for networking with other people, especially in any type of

Be talkative and chatty. No. It's weird because, I mean, you tell me if you're different, but like I was a super shy kid and I feel like I'm more of like a trained extrovert rather than an actual one. Trained extrovert. That's new. I never heard about that. Or like a deceitful extrovert. It's like having a battery. It's like naturally I am very happy to like to sit alone and kind of just read the news or just chill.

And if I didn't have that time, I'd be frustrated. And when I'm extroverted, it's more of like almost like a deliberate. You know, it's like, know, you're on the field, so you're playing, you know, not that I enjoy being friendly and chatty, but your original question was what tips would you have to start or to be in it? hmm. I guess most important thing is the attitude that first off, you don't know enough by yourself.

So get rid of that. Whatever part of your ego depends on that. Get rid of that one. Because the more people you meet, the more advice you get. And just like if we were 10 year olds talking about the next video game or did you see the game last night? The trade of information and feeling and energy. You do the exact same thing as a 25 year old or a 30 year old with networking. With us as Temple students, our

Intro to networking was pretty sober. What was like we were told pretty directly and this is it You know over 10 years ago now was hey We're not Drexel You're not no seriously seriously and this this by all means shout out the Drexel like great people Our temple like one specifically was like hey, you're at temple for engineering You're not a Penn State and you're definitely not a Drexel and Drexel is a phenomenal engineering school across the board

They're phenomenal for a lot of reasons, really a lot of one of them, I don't know why I'm plugging Drexel, but whatever, is they have phenomenal co -op programs. Yes. Because earned experience is important in the industry. But we have internships, but the co -op is so strong. So they said pretty straight up, like, go network, show me you went to this event.

or this thing or this young members professional thing, I will give you five points in the next quiz. Just go do it. And they're very, they're very just straight up about it. So I got lucky that I had people just being like, you know, incentivize me to do it. What if you don't have that support system or that pressure?

If you don't have it, and I appreciate that for a lot of people, networking sounds like an easy thing to do, but if you don't think you look, for people who look a certain way or come off a certain way, it will definitely be easier. Or at least will be easier for unfair reasons, right? So I appreciate when people say, I'm not good at it I don't like networking. I don't take it lightly. I'm lucky, I'd say we're both lucky that we,

Get to have some of the talents we do as people that we can communicate. It seems freely and happily. But I would say networking is a skill worth working on. And just because you're not naturally good at it doesn't mean you shouldn't work on it. I'm not actually going to go in the gym, but I'm trying to go to the gym. How do you do that? How do you start? The beauty of it is, is that just like you might have a natural need for the networking of society or whatever else.

They probably already are hoping you'll find them. That's the thing I didn't take into account as a kid. I thought I was always having to put my best foot forward because I'm the one who's lucky to be here. And it's a good attitude to have. Yeah, it's going to be like that. But now that I'm on the other side of it, you know, organizing a few things myself and realizing, man, I hope the kids come to our thing. Right. So realize that you are not just some lowly, you know, college kid or

kid not from a different community or wherever else. With networking, you might run to people from different backgrounds and income levels that you are not from. And for me personally, I still sometimes think about that. But these places are looking for...

people who have energy and interest just as much as you're looking for a place that has experience and connection. So the door is not, it's not just a one way thing where you're climbing up the hill. They're hoping you're coming along. And frankly, whether it's college or not really, any line of work.

You've probably seen things like there are in general there are less people being born at least at this current moment in the United States wherever else there are definitely less kids going to college in our line of soldiering man, there's a little bit of a shortage to be frank with you if you're in any kind of line of professional work or anything, but God there are so many people like from their age 30 and onwards where like like like where are the young people at anymore? I need someone to train and educate so This is probably the best

time to be in networking. Cause when I started networking a decade plus ago, it was different. I would wear like a suit and tie to make myself look presentable to someone. And that's a good thing. But now I realize it's like your ability to show up and care is tremendous because you know, a say a 25 year old could be off watching TV on a Thursday night and you chose to come out to this stuffy hotel room, listen to a technical session and chat with some people that you don't know.

Yeah, there's definitely a strong point on that, we, especially the younger generation, it's all social media, right? It's all about the technological things. Even dating, we have multiple different dating apps now.

It's difficult. So and why not come naturally? Yeah, and and just coming out and meeting meeting people. that's that's really intimidating. And especially in networking events where there's the technical you mentioned like the technical stuff that that is discussed. We get intimidated by the fact that we don't know all these things. It might be overwhelming. Yeah. Especially when you meet people who are just as old as your parents or maybe even older. Yeah. You're like, why am I in this in this room? I'd rather be people around my age and people around my age tends

be with going to parties, having fun and doing extracurricular activities. To that point though, and I was going to ask you how you felt when you started networking, because I'm curious to know if you were always so good at it as you are now. But to your point about parties though, by the way, the serious answer why I would say, no, you know, not half bad at networking. Not half bad. Is because...

Those house parties I went to like I don't know if house parties was part of your growing up for me from age 18 to like 23 at least different house parties every other weekend and it was not about work. It was about drinking and watching football or else that is networking to networking is really just a multi -civil word that we're socializing. Yes socializing and honestly networking is a bit easier because when you're socializing at a party. man what is this person like. I don't know.

If you go to a networking event about civil engineering topics, it's a reasonable conclusion that the other people there will be interested in civil engineering topics. So if anything, it makes it a bit easier. you know, that's why it's good to kind of keep a tab on it. I really like appreciate when people come and they're not necessarily super networking and you can kind of tell that and.

you know, what you have to do is like be willing to reach out to them, bring them in. And for someone, you're if you're shy, very shy, whatever. What's nice about these professional orgs, at least, is that they have so many windows of volunteering. And sometimes one of the best ways, if you don't feel like you're the most chatty person and you can't just like make people laugh, that's OK. Maybe you can display value and connection by saying, you do this event. I'll help you volunteer at some, you know, very easy to do level.

And now you're part of the team. know, so if you're if you have a hard time socializing with the people or the attendees that's there, it's much better to just volunteer yourself. Now you're in that forced situation of, now I really have to do stuff. Yeah. And perhaps you get a quick shout out and you have a conversation starter. I'm actually doing this for this event. Yeah. What makes you bring here? What brings you here? And you start that conversation and now you have that forced interaction that

Causes you to network a little bit more. Yeah. And honestly, like another thought is that like, know, it always sucks to feel like the odd kid in class, you know, and I've been there. I've been there many times. There are strength to be an odd kid in the class. Yeah. But put it this way, like the people who take socializing for granted, those people probably aren't at networking events anyway. True. Because again, it's a Thursday night in whatever season.

And you could be anywhere. could be at the bar. You'd be at your house playing video games. You could be on date night, whatever else you chose to go to a kind of work related thing. You might not be that good at socializing, but probably half that room is also not very good at socializing. They're so invested in this particular topic. They chose to come out to this rather than go out and watch the game on Thursday night or whatever. Yeah. You. And that's what's kind of interesting is whether it's college or networking, wherever else. Lean into your weird thing and you'll find your tribe.

Your tribe doesn't to be static it can grow and it can change and you know flex but lean into Again, would you love not because of a heartwarming feeling but because it's good strategy. Mmm If you lean into what you love you tend to find a lot of people like you like I don't know a lot of musicians because I happen to I know a lot of musicians cuz I hung out music stores and I just goofed around like it's the same way if Okay, if your passion is just

You know, highway topics in civil engineering. You go to a group that's about that and there is such a group and very suddenly you realize you kind of fit in with them, not just because you have that one topic in common, but you probably have other things in common too. So at minimum, if it makes you uncomfortable to do it, just.

force yourself. I tell myself go to the gym. the things that you love. That's what we talked about in the beginning of the podcast and find a people that love the things that you love. Yeah. And then be completely okay with it that you don't have to work in terms of absolute. Again, 50 or 60 or 70 percent love or like still useful information. Yeah. I like the mindset that you mentioned earlier of

You know, you're not the only one that is nervous. You're not the only one that is scared. And the event organizers are appreciative of you just being there and showing up as opposed to not having anyone at all. That would be like a failed event. Right. So yeah, just know that you're appreciated just by being there and it's okay to be intimidated, to be overwhelmed. Yeah. But I think the best thing is you come out of that event knowing that you did it.

That's best feeling of once you know, you did it once. Yeah, because like seriously, like as a like man, just like earlier, you come to a place and then some hot summer afternoon and you figure their network and you're like, man, why am I sweaty? Why did I walk that far from the parking lot? You know, the hell and but then you were like, I'm not wearing exactly the kind of things that they're wearing here. I don't look so professional, quote unquote.

Fine, it's data. You took it in and you're learning now. You're part of the system. know what mean? we're all social animals. It's gonna be pretty hard to get along without socializing. But find the places. I would say this, rather than networking side, at least network in ways that appeal to you, even if they're not about work per se, or career. If it's about playing pickup soccer games, or whatever, or

Board games and again in the city of Philadelphia, whatever thing you're into, there's probably some place that serves your interest. Go do that because that's the nice thing about the earned experience of networking. Hang out with friends is a networking skill. If you've already done that in one arena, at least one, they'll probably do it another one. Yeah, you know, and even if you're not good at that necessarily.

If you like what you do, that itself is the topic and you just bring yourself to places they talk about that topic. Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been networking for I think I started in the real estate industry about six years ago and that was my first actual networking event. was a real estate event. Yeah. And how did you feel? I was intimidated, man. I was 18 years old at the time.

At the time I had a kind of cleaning business. was the business development kind of sales guy. And I thought that I could make more money dealing with people who have houses. Right. That's why I went to that real estate event. And I remember in that bathroom, I mentioned this couple of times throughout other podcast episodes too, that I was very, very nervous. got the event started at six o 'clock. I got there at five thirty. And when I got there, I was in the bathroom for the first 30 minutes because I know, OK, I'm going to

My goal was I'm gonna be that six and then I'm gonna greet people as people come in and Once they've kind of packed kind of have a lot of people I know everyone because they came in right that was my goal. Yeah or strategy However, I wasn't a better for 30 minutes plus just washing my face. I got this I got this and yeah, and obviously that there were there were a bunch of older folks that I didn't know and

and also the vocabulary that were used back and forth. And obviously as a young person, you don't know what value that you're going to give. Everyone's there have their own skill sets and things that they're good at. you're like, can I clean your houses? Well, that's actually interesting because as I'm kind of on the window seat of being a young person, we all know the idea of you need a mentor because you want to move up. Sure. We all get that. As I get older, a mentor of mine who's an older person,

Uses you also as you get older would need to get good at mentoring down, which is to say Someone who's younger than you can still be Serving a form of mentoring you because they're giving you exposure to perspectives that because of your age or position You don't have access to anymore. Hmm, you know like it's I Remember how I feel like I remember the feeling of being like a first -year, you know entry -level engineer And now I realize like that I can now that I delegate to a few of them

I wonder how they perceive me. You know what I mean? And it's hard to get to that if you're not actually hanging out with people and learning from them. That's why, like for me, like if I go to a networking event and I chat and hear perspectives or the complaints of a 25 year old, that really means a lot to me now, actually, because I want to be responsible for the 25 year olds I'm around. Obviously beyond just giving work and whatnot, but like.

This process of learning, there's no one technique and there's no end to it. But wherever you started at, whether it's like playing Dungeons and Dragons at this game place or playing pickup soccer or networking a professional event.

I found that if you lean into your weirdness, you'll find your tribe pretty quickly. Yeah. And that's probably the hard part is admitting where you're you think you're weird. In reality, you're not weird at all. You just haven't found out your people yet. Yeah. You know, you're not the odd one in the community. No, because again, for our interests, I mean, like who wants to spend this many evenings of like so many fun things to do in the city talking about questions of, you know, land use or development?

So many people with their eyes which is glaze over. I think it's your weirdness. I think it's the lack of goals. if you're if you don't have you know the mindset comes comes first obviously but going to these events if you're just going just going it might not be as effective as you think but if you have a set goal I mentioned earlier I went to that event so that I could get more clients right. And I'm pretty sure there's other people have similar goals and probably in different industries but

At the end of the day once you go in there I mean there are times where I still feel nervous of going to events like even even in groups that I've never been to I'd be in a car and I'm like Should I go? I'll be honest like there are days like I've been signed up for XYZ event and it's just like the wrong Tuesday I'm just like kind of tired. Yeah, I'm like, you know what? not going yes, know, that's okay And sometimes your goal is just to prove to yourself. You can hang in there. That's fine

For me, actually didn't, for a lot of them, don't go with a stated goal per se, but I go with like, you know, if you wanted to say, if you wanted to become a great basketball player in the neighborhood, probably the best thing to do is hang out at the court where people are playing basketball. Like my dad would always say is like, if you want to catch a cold.

try to hang out with sick people. And I kind of look at successful habits the same way. I don't go to networking events thinking, you know, what is Aldo going to tell me today? But if I go to events where I hang out with Aldo and 10 people kind of like Aldo, you know, in terms of energy and interest, you don't come around with any specific piece of advice, but you let yourself get sick. And I mean that in a good way. You let yourself get that contagion, you know, because it's one thing, you know,

That is exactly how I felt when I was in the beginning of college trying to study. like, I don't want to study. I want to just not do this. I'm not interested. But then you meet people who are fired up, and you're like, no, no, no. I want to study because I want to prove that I can hang in with them on this thing. And you let that social element merge with your technical requirement. And that's really how I apply actually personally for personal issues or career -related ones.

my main thesis for myself when it comes to networks and people in general is find what you'd rather be like or what you would like to be good at and simply bring yourself into proximity repeatedly with people like that. Because even if you retain 10 % of what an excellent person knows, that 10 % it may be way more than what these people know. Yeah. You know, like so that's kind of it actually. Like that's why I go to so many networking things because

Contrary to this interview, like I am by no means, you know, I'm a pretty regular staff engineer, you know, getting a little senior now, but like, you know, regular person. My thought is if I go to people who've been investing in this for decades, long than I've been alive, maybe.

And get even five percent of what they got and think about they do that's a much better use of my time and energy Then reading about it abstractly and saying I'll figure it out my own that is a useless attitude. Yeah, you know, that's awesome now

I ask this question for every guest. It's the same question that I all the guests. The name of the podcast is called Kaizen Blueprint. Kaizen is Japanese term for continuous improvement. What are the things that you do on a daily basis, whether that's habits, tools, systems, you name it, that has benefited you greatly that you think can benefit other people?

Compliment myself quite a bit It sounds pretty bad, but no I put it this way I think we're all all of us are usually pretty good at counter our losses or our internal failures over time It's may this may be me being an egotistic person, but that's okay. -huh, but I I kind of over time like just told myself, you know what Dan like you're pretty good about counting your losses You're pretty good about

Cataloging all your mini failures have probably known but you notices If you're do that or if you can't stop yourself from doing that and You know, it's hard for me to stop doing that probably for a lot of people You want it you should at least try to be even -handed and count your wins So if I can go through like a not necessarily a day but like say at least a work week or I do something that like

even if it's not objectively impressive is impressive for me like, at least breaking some sort of ground for me. Like, congratulate yourself on that. And let yourself get a little bit of a healthy ego boost or a hit or a hit like recently like man, I'm just spending the summer like, you know, getting back slowly to the gym and whatnot. And

I can feel myself like climbing out of the hole I've been digging myself into. But, you know, if you don't take appreciation for what you're doing right, you're going to give yourself a weird funhouse mirror when you only self -criticize. So you had to make...

Not self -congratulatory stuff, but you have to be willing to catalog yourself honestly. Most people are very good at doing that in the negative aspect. But it takes a little bit of discipline, but it's also fun to do that in the positive aspect. Have you ever heard of David Goggins?

I've heard of him. I'm not super familiar. He's a hardcore like fitness. his fitness and mindset. He wrote a few books about mindset and it's great if you're working out or just listening. And one of the things that he talks about in his book and one of the concepts that he uses similar to what you said compliment yourself is called the cookie jar. okay. Cookie jar method. So let's say you're going through a tough

I wouldn't say a breakup, but more challenging things like going to the gym and you're having perhaps like stagnated. You're like, I don't feel changes in my weight or my muscle or just just anything. What he would say is think about like a cookie jar and then you have a bunch of cookies inside that cookie jar and you just grab the cookie and each cookie is kind of like, OK, I went to the gym three times last week, so I did something good.

I'm going to the gym and that's good enough for me to be here and then strive to do better. So just thinking about the life challenges that you have, know that you've been through so much yourself in the past that you can fight through whatever challenges that you have in this current stage, in this present moment. Yeah, I think it's like if you only saw the past week of mistakes you've made, that would kind of...

Suck yeah, you would feel like not going out of bed and sometimes you do not feel like getting out of bed but if you Try to make a discipline of saying I did that thing right or I did that thing I didn't look I could do that way even if it's like a small thing we're like like for me I just presented some information last week that really helped out where it needed to be helped out and that's a win not just for me, for other people and it's like let yourself feel good about that actually feel good and

Not dwell on it too long, but let yourself feel the hit and have an accurate accounting of yourself. And that's sounds easy to do. It's not our brains kind of like, cause we, you know, we all, guess, evolutionarily grew up in jungles, wherever else we're very good at identifying what we think is a threat. And the threat isn't usually what it used to be, which was, used to be like a tiger in the jungle. It's usually maybe like a social faux pas or some.

Measure of what you think you haven't done yet. I didn't get this degree. I didn't get that salary yet. I didn't get the promotion. I didn't get the house or the car or the whatever. And you feel it in your body and your brain the same way you might feel a real threat like a tiger trying to eat you. But it's not. So realize that piece of your brain is running just like machinery. So that's how you evolved. But don't take shame in it.

and then spring in this notion of if I'm going to self -criticize and I can't stop or I don't want to stop it, fine. Let me at least self -praise as well in an objective way. Yeah. And it's good for you. I didn't kind of strive you to push forward. I like to think of it. I mean, you...

done really good analytics of being in a jungle, but I like to just simply think about, like, let's say you're running, you're running a marathon. You're on mile three and you're like, I want to give up right now. But hey, look at what you've done. You've done three miles so far and then you keep driving forward. You've been training this for X amount of time and you're doing this. It's okay. And that's what I like to think about in life and in any challenges that you have in life.

Right, just... It's so weird that the games we play ourselves, I guess as you know, I've been chatting just now, the idea of whatever rules or advice you get, there's never an end to advice, you know. Don't let the idea of the absolutes be governing for it, you know. Like, it doesn't have to be, I entirely hate this or entirely love this or I don't feel it yet or I don't feel it at all. And if I don't feel it now, I won't feel it later.

allow for those percent differences in those gray areas to happen. know, you know, realize that there's strategy in that, not just feeling good. Yeah. But that's my thought. What's next for you? Dinner. No, no. No, next for me is like, so my next career path thing will be to get a license, professional engineering license, which is a huge capstone because it makes you legally responsible.

And after that man, mean, emotionally, I'm more and more interested in getting a master's degree. But no, like for me, I've been learning a lot about that. Again, that notion of safety from a traffic perspective. I'd like to take a lot of that and use it for a city like Philadelphia, you know, that's the hope. Making a change in a city that you live in. Yeah, no, no, that's the cool thing. Like, you know, I'm on.

I don't get the kick out of doing the technical thing. I get the kick out of people using what you make. Yeah. Creating an impact. Yeah. Because if it's not about other people, then it's kind of just a wash. Yeah. Yeah. But that's mine. That's good. Where can people find more about you? Probably LinkedIn. LinkedIn. My name. You can put a little floating text box right here. OK. No, Dan Vomik.

And yeah, that's the perfect place to find out about me. And if you don't see me on some other YouTuber website, you know, find me there. Last question. Yes. If you could redesign any city in the world, which one would it be and why?

Redesign any city No, I mean I've I stated my stated goals I would like to work on this one I like to resign this city because it's when I grew up in this one I love and For the part of the city I live in it lacks a lot of what I actually work on Okay, and I would like to make Northeast Philly a lot more transit friendly That'd be my that'd be my little piece. I would like to redesign. What's the other? Let's do top three top three things you would change in Philadelphia go

As me or as a professional? he says, Got three. Okay. All right. This cars thing essentially is not going to work any further than it has worked. You have to lean into transit. So it'll be better for all of us. Two, it would be nice to improve a place and then not make it so expensive that we kick people out of it effectively. That sucks. And three, three.

Hmm.

Final one. man. We have so many good things. I would say improve the food scene where food seems phenomenal You know, No, you don't make it easier to just walk and bike around here man, it sounds easy to do we get rated as being a very walkable city But if you guys outside the city core, it can change pretty rapidly I'd like this to be a place that like people can just get around the region not just from inside Philly to Philly Camden Philly KOP, whatever else like

There's so much of what, you know, as Americans we grew up in. We think we're relatively social, but compared to places like Amsterdam or Japan, our idea of socializing, I would argue is a little bit underdeveloped. Let's have a more social and friendly and safe place. Awesome. And any final tips for other civil engineers out there? young ones, guess. Yeah. Man, tips.

You know what? I've seen some resumes lately related to my stuff. resumes. Yeah, like don't don't make for anyone trying to get hired anyway, I guess. Or younger people don't like throw the whole kitchen sink at me because pick what you actually like and feel you're good at and make it just that. And I guess my story said earlier, though, just like leaning into the thing that you think you would.

like to learn about if you were not getting paid for it. Because that's really what I'm doing now. I'm doing the piece of civil engineering that I'd be interested in even if I didn't work in this at all. Once. So having done that, this has made my current career arc so much more fun. Like I feel like my biggest fear as a kid was like in order to become a successful adult paying the bills, I'm going to have to some extent kill that kid and his interest. And that felt like a huge betrayal. I hate that feeling.

And only recently in these past three -ish, four -ish years, I feel like I've honored that 12 -year -old that I was. So yeah, find a way to, I guess, honor the kid that you were.

Cause you didn't get an engineering really cause you said, I want this income level or some stuff. If you really wanted an income, you'd probably do some of these sides of engineering. yeah. Find a way to honor that kid and find what is kind of weird and find your tribe with that. So find your tribe under that kid doing the things that you love. Yeah. So a lot of things. Yeah. Dan, thank you so much for being on show. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Signing out. Thank you.