Kittelson & Associates

Kittelson & Associates has done one thing since 1985: transportation. Founding principal Wayne Kittelson built the firm around traffic engineering, planning and research, and its staff have written a fair share of the manuals the profession works from. The firm now operates about 30 offices nationwide as what it calls one office in many locations, and it publishes a corporate correspondence address in Orlando, Florida. Its Portland, Oregon office at 851 SW 6th Avenue is where Wayne Kittelson is still listed as a senior principal engineer. That office is local to the Portland Art Museum Expansion and Mark Rothko Pavilion, where Kittelson served as traffic engineer on the Hennebery Eddy and Vinci Hamp design team.

Twenty-eight offices, and the firm is careful about how it describes them: one office in many locations. That is not a slogan so much as an operating model. A traffic study in Charlotte can be led by whoever in the firm has done that specific kind of analysis before, wherever they happen to sit, because the work is organised around the problem rather than around a branch’s revenue. For a client it means the depth available is the whole firm’s rather than the local office’s.

The office list runs coast to coast: Baltimore, Bend, Boise, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Eugene, Oakland, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle among them, with Orlando carrying the corporate correspondence address.

Four disciplines are published – planning, operations, design and research – and research being one of them is the thing to notice. Most engineering firms consume the manuals; this one claims to have written a fair share of them. That claim is checkable in a way most firm boasts are not: the Highway Capacity Manual, the Highway Safety Manual and NCHRP reports all list their authors. A firm whose staff appear in those pages brings a different kind of authority to a contested intersection analysis, because the method under argument is one they helped write.

Research also changes how a firm argues. On a project where a city and a neighbourhood disagree about what a signal timing change will do, the useful contribution is not a stronger opinion but the study that settles it.

Wayne Kittelson, the founding principal, is still listed as a senior principal engineer in the Portland office – more than four decades after founding the firm. That continuity is unusual in consulting engineering and shows up in how the practice has stayed to one subject rather than diversifying.

The firm also runs the Kittelson Charitable Foundation, a 501(c)(3) supporting students facing barriers to education.

The Orlando address is 225 East Robinson Street, Suite 355, on 800.878.5230.