Hey, I'm Adriana
I am a fifth-year Civil Engineering student at UWaterloo, which is to say I have spent five years learning to think about structural, water resources, and soil/rock systems in increasingly sophisticated ways, though I find myself drawn instead to the science of human movement: how people get from one place to another, and why they so often cannot. I am interested in transit data, and in transportation engineering and planning, which is the amazing science and art of accommodating the fact that everyone wants to be somewhere else. I also concern myself with open source software, because there is something appealing about building things that belong to everyone and no one.
Why transportation? The simple answer is endless hours taking the bus around town. Sitting on those buses, I began to notice things: how the wheelchair lift never quite worked in winter, how the schedule was more aspiration than promise, how the entire system seemed designed by people who had never actually ridden it. Working on the infrastructure you depend on is a particular kind of privilege: to be able to improve the very systems that you grew up using.
I believe:
- Nobody should find their mobility constrained by the unreliability of systems that claim to serve them, whether they travel by car, bus, train, bicycle, or mobility device.
- Communities with fast, punctual transit and thoughtfully designed spaces for walking and cycling tend to be places where people actually want to live, rather than simply endure living.
- There is no perfect transportation system, and every city that tries to become Amsterdam will fail in interesting ways, but at the end of the day, every city can manage to run a decent bus network, which is perhaps all most of us really need.
My work:
- Working on Stage 2 of the ION light rail train project from Kitchener --> Cambridge! 🚆
- Worked on mobility hub and transportation planning projects at Stantec
- Joined the OpenTripPlanner Project to improve trip planning accessibility for transit agencies.
- Worked on TRANSIT-data-tools, a platform to help transit agencies, big and small, manage their GTFS data.
- Launched and organized youth city building events and experiments at Urban Minds.
- Collaborated with a team of students at my school to retrofit and outline finances for century-old residential homes in Kitchener, Ontario Canada, making them energy-efficient and affordable for a local Indigenous family!
- Helped make the housing and mortgage process easier for tens of thousands of clients as a software developer at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).
When I'm not thinking about light rail trains, I can be found cross-country skiing, travelling, reading or painting!
Feel free to stroll through my projects or my open-source contributions on GitHub, read my posts, request my resume or connect with me on LinkedIn!
I'm always open to chat about anything. My inbox is open!
OSMnx plot of Waterloo, Ontario