Interview with ITE CO/WY 2025 Transportation Professional of the Year Award recipient, Dr. Wes Marshall
Posted by cowyite on Apr. 14, 2026 / Colorado-Wyoming Section Notifications / Subscribe 0
Background & Motivation
1. What first drew you to transportation engineering and safety? Was there a specific moment or person that sparked your interest?
I never set out to focus on transportation, let alone safety. My original path in Civil Engineering was more on the Structural side. My thinking was that would be a useful background for a lot of possibilities, including architecture. But I also wasn’t sure and figured I’d work for a bit first.
So I started off working in the Boston area in a job focused on Site Engineering. It was the sort of job where you need to be a jack-of-all-trades, so yes I did some structural, but I also did hydrology, geotech, and transportation. The results on the transportation side were always what annoyed me the most because we were never designing places that felt nearly as good as the things I was already seeing right in front of me in the Boston area.
That got me thinking, but it really wasn’t until a few years after college when I first moved to a place that I couldn’t leave my street without being in a car. Having grown up in a place where I could walk or bike all over town as a kid, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I could no longer walk or bike anywhere. When I asked my neighbors about it after seeing them chauffeur their kids all over town, they didn’t understand what I was talking about or what they were missing out on. When I asked people at work why we design things this way or that way, I could never get good enough answers to satisfy my curiosity.
So right after getting my P.E., I’m applying to graduate schools for transportation.
2. Looking back at your career journey, were there any turning points that shaped your direction in the field?
I didn’t know this at the time I was applying, but graduate school – and especially a PhD – is much more about your advisor than the school itself. I focused on convenience of the latter but was extremely fortunate to end up with Dr. Norman Garrick. I joke that he was my Jamaican Dumbledore, and I can honestly say that I would not be doing what I am doing today without him.
The other thing I’d say here has more to do with the luck of the draw when it came to me ending up in Colorado. When you are a PhD student out applying for tenure-track jobs, you really have no idea where you are going to land, if anywhere. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Denver turned out to be the perfect place for what I wanted to do. And everything that has happened on the transportation side here – combined with everyone I’ve met that is pushing in the right direction – has definitely shaped my direction in the field.
3. Many of us know your book Killed by a Traffic Engineer. What motivated you to write it and how did writing it influence your subsequent work?
To be honest, it was mostly a mixture of anger and curiosity. I was angry about the disconnect between what the data was showing me to be safe versus what I was taught regarding the transportation-related procedures and protocols that supposedly lead to safety. But I was also curious to see what the science really was behind those things that I was assured were completely scientific.
So my process was simply to dive down various rabbit holes to find the origin stories of WHY we traffic engineers do what we do. What I found felt bigger than a few research papers. Next thing you know, I’m writing a book.
Philosophy & Approach
4. You have consistently emphasized safety in transportation. How would you describe your core philosophy or guiding principles when tackling safety challenges?
When a fatal or serious crash happens, I keep asking why. Not just what happened, but why was that outcome possible in the first place. Why did these road users do what they did? When you keep digging and continue to ask why, you start to understand these events differently than our conventional crash data suggests. They follow systemic patterns. And when you start to see those patterns in our designs, you begin to realize that we don’t have to wait for people to get hurt before we intervene. We can be much more proactive than we are now.
5. You teach and mentor students. What do you hope your future practitioners will take away from your classes beyond the technical content?
I’m guessing that a few people reading this have already taken one of my classes and already have a good sense of how I might answer this. So, first off, a good engineer needs to know the technical content and be able to perform the sorts of analyses we do as transportation engineers. Everybody teaches that part.
But a great engineer needs to understand what is happening under the hood and be able to consider the possible implications of their work. They also need to have the ability to admit that things didn’t turn out as expected and be willing to go back to the drawing board. We go out of our way to teach this part as well.
Impact & Legacy
7. Winning the Institute of Transportation Engineers CO/WY Section Transportation Professional of the Year award is a great honor. What does the award mean to you personally and professionally?
I’ve been part of ITE for decades, so I was actually a bit worried that this book might make me persona non grata for the foreseeable future. But, I also felt confident that I had done my homework and that folks would eventually come around – in a decade or so – once they realized that I was only trying to help improve our profession.
So, to be given this award in 2025 instead of like 2035 was definitely surprising. At the same time, I feel like it also says something about my ITE colleagues. They have seen that we all share a goal of improving our profession and making communities safer.
8. When you look at your body of work, what do you hope will be your lasting legacy in the field of transportation?
I’m proud of my research and the book, but I’m even more proud of the hundreds of students that have come through our program at CU Denver since I arrived here in 2009. Back then, I’d go to a local ITE event and know nobody. Now when I go, I see so many former students. So while I hope they all exited our program as better engineers and people than when they entered, I also hope they pass along what they learned to the next generation of engineers.
Challenges & Innovation
10. What do you see as the biggest challenge in transportation safety today, especially for urban arterials and other high-injury corridors?
There are a dozen things I could point to for this. And if you are interested, I do have a 400-page book on this topic…
11. How do you approach failure or “lessons learned” in your work? Is there a time when a project didn’t go as planned and what you took away from that experience?
I try to treat failure the same way I treat crashes. Ask why. Not who is at fault, but what in the system led to that outcome. How can we do better? How can we be better?
Mentorship & Inclusion
13. What advice would you give to young engineers, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds, who aspire to make a difference in transportation?
We need you in this field. We need your background and your lived experience. Transportation shapes everyone’s daily life, so the profession should reflect that diversity. Even if you never pictured yourself as an engineer, there is space for you here. And the field will be better because of it.
14. How can professional organizations like ITE at the student and professional levels better foster inclusive leadership and participation?
When it comes to running a good community meeting, we teach future engineers to be intentional about who has a seat at the table and who is missing. That standard should apply to us as well. We have to look honestly at who is participating and who is not, and then take steps to close that gap.
Looking Ahead
16. What upcoming research, project or initiative are you most excited about right now?
One of the fun things I’ve been doing over the last few months is a podcast called Look Both Ways with David & Wes. David Zipper is a fantastic transportation policy expert and writer who focuses on cities, technology, and mobility. The show is basically pragmatic conversations about all things transportation. We try to look at issues from multiple sides and keep it grounded in evidence, but also have some fun with it. It gives me a chance to talk about transportation topics that probably will not turn into formal research projects, but still really matter.
17. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the transportation system tomorrow, what would that be?
I would change how we define success. The goal of transportation is not to reduce congestion. It is to get people and goods where they need to go. It is about access. Yet we often measure performance in terms of delay and vehicle throughput. What we measure drives what we build. If we started by asking the right questions about access and safety, our designs would look very different.
18. Over the next 5-10 years, what changes do you hope to see in how cities approach traffic safety, multimodal planning, and community engagement?
Over the next 5 to 10 years, I hope cities continue shifting toward proactive, systemic safety. But I also hope they resist the temptation to redesign themselves for the sake of autonomous vehicles or other such technologies. We fell into that trap 100 years ago with cars. Many of the cities that reshaped themselves to move vehicles faster were worse off for it. With AVs, we should apply those lessons. The technology should adapt to the city, not the other way around. Safety, access, and walkability should come first. If AVs can fit within that framework, great. If not, we should not reshape our cities around them.
Personal Insights
19. If you weren’t in transportation engineering, what other path might you have followed?
I’ve long said that I’m very lucky to have a job that I’d do as a hobby. I’ve only recently started to understand how that mindset keeps things fun – which in turn makes me better at what I do.
So when I look around at what other professions would never feel like work, the only other one that comes to mind is a basketball coach.
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