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Meet Bob Hu

Job: 

Senior Transport Engineer.

Job description: 

Undertake transportation planning and operational designs. Assess traffic impacts against national, regional and local policies.

Work background: 
  • 2007-2014; Transport Planner / Modeller, Opus International Consultants Ltd.
  • 2014 – current; Senior Transport Engineer, Beca Ltd.
Favourite part of job: 

The feeling of driving on the part of the road network that I’ve been working on is great and the traffic analysis and assessment itself is fun.

Least favourite part of job: 

The number crunching…

What I am working on now: 
  • The Ngauranga to Aotea Quay Smart Motorway
  • Wellington Ngauranga to Airport transport model rebuild
  • A number of traffic impact assessments around the Wellington Region.
A quick story about a job well done: 

Often traffic planners don't consider the impacts of traffic congestion in the weekends so I've researched this. I have been able to find a statistical relationship between weekend and weekday patterns in Wellington. I felt lucky that such a relationship could be found in Wellington, even though it may not be relevant for other cities. 

A (humorous) story about a job that went badly and what you learned: 

I was involved with a transport safety improvement project. The site was known to be dangerous for drivers, however the findings showed that it was not feasible to fix this. I found out that the reason for the findings were because there haven’t been any crashes reported at this site. One of my colleagues even joked that I should go and sacrifice myself (crash) to save the project!In the end, I decided not to sacrifice myself, but still recommended that the safety improvement is needed on the site because it has a high risk. I learnt that we need to save people before anything bad happens!

Qualifications: 
  • Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Statistics;
  • Master of Engineer Studies in Transportation;
  • PhD Candidate Topic in Intelligent Transport Systems of Improving transport performance.
Interests outside work: 

Basketball and pop music.


Bob Hu is a Senior Transport Engineer. Image: NZTA.

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