Listen Here
James E. Thomas, PE, Assistant Vice President- East Gulf Traffic Engineering & Transportation Planning Manager at Volkert Inc., has had an appreciation for GIS since college. His coursework in GIS quickly demonstrated the value of spatial analysis in his engineering methods and practices. Fast forward, in his efforts as a transportation engineer, exposure to GIS provided James with a unique insight into the challenges of urban planning. James has been instrumental in providing GIS resources and capabilities to his clients and teams, managing projects of various scopes and sizes throughout his career. He has worked his way up into increasingly more challenging and high-profile engineering roles, championing the need for geospatial analysis along the way. He encourages new engineers to embrace the technology and has promoted it across the engineering firms where he has been employed. James believes his exposure to GIS and his willingness to use it opened doors to other opportunities and skills, including coding. He branched into Python and recognized how he could implement scripts to improve his efficiency even more. He credits GIS with allowing his firms to have opportunities for work they would not have had otherwise and enabled increased revenue as a result. The capabilities of Esri’s software from the desktop to the field are utilized by James and his teams.
For as long as I have known James, his work ethic has been incredible. He is a third-generation engineer and grew up with family who nurtured his curiosity about the world around him. He is driven to help others and make the world a little bit better. He views challenges as puzzles to be solved and he enjoys routing his way to a solution. As we discuss in the episode, James works to solve the “See What Others Can’t” kind of problems in his field.
At Volkert Inc., an engineering company celebrating its centennial anniversary, James works with clients across the Gulf Coast region of the southeastern United States. His nearly two decades of traffic engineering, transportation planning, and management experience, both within the United States and Europe, has resulted in a passion to build smarter communities. With a typically overflowing workload, James is very motivated to use technology in ways that allow him to do his job better and with more efficiency. His project experience includes traffic studies, traffic signal design, corridor planning studies, bicycle and pedestrian safety studies, roadway master planning, and travel demand modeling along with GIS. He appreciates how GIS can help him solve problems faster, provide visual representations, and improve messaging to his clients. He says that accepting and incorporating various technologies along with standard engineering practices has allowed the field to grow in ways that it otherwise would not have.
I think the best way to wrap up this episode with James is to leave y’all with paraphrased words of wisdom from his granddad that he shared with me because I feel they are truly at the core of who James is: “always try to go to bed having learned something new”.
Commenting is not enabled for this article.