2022 YPT Changemakers in Transportation Award: Kush Bhagat

Kush Bhagat sets an example for what all transportation engineers should strive to be between his technical abilities, research, involvement, and safety work. In his career, he has made significant impacts to enhance safety, particularly in the State of Florida, which has a reputation for having dangerous roads for many different users. Since 2017, Kush has been in Central Florida working as a consultant in the traffic safety, traffic signal retiming, signal design, and development services arenas. His expertise includes transportation safety planning and analysis, traffic operations, traffic impact assessments, parking studies, and signal design. Kush is also experienced in crash data analysis and trends, having participated in numerous Road Safety Audits (RSA) in Massachusetts while working at MassDOT. He has been able to refine his traffic operations skills while working with conventional Time-of-Day (TOD) and adaptive signal systems on microsimulation-based signal retiming projects throughout Florida, and he has also assisted with signing and marking studies at several Florida airports. As a consultant, Kush has also been a big part of the latest update to the FDOT Traffic Engineering Manual section 3.11 to now include Lead Pedestrian Intervals. This addition will now be part of a standard guide for all engineers in the state of Florida, expanding the potential for change. He is passionate about traffic safety and is eager to help make our network safer for the public and reduce and eliminate traffic fatalities and injuries.

Kush has been a long-time member of YPT, both in Boston and down in Orlando where he was part of the original group to create the Orlando Chapter. Under his leadership in the Vice Chair role, we have seen the YPT Orlando Chapter grow from 3 of us as an initial board during the peak of COVID-19 to about 40 active members today. He even ran a YPT event for young professionals to present their work to each other, where he discussed pedestrian-friendly signal timing strategies. This quote from a coworker of his puts it best: “Kush has been a leader in the area of using signal timing to accomplish safety goals. He shared that a first step in doing that is understanding the context of the signal: who it serves and for which trips. Knowing this, it’s possible to have productive discussions on the safety, access, and mobility trade-offs inherent in signal timing.” Between Kush’s experience in research on pedestrian signal timing strategies, safety assessments, bicycle and pedestrian master plans, and more, he has demonstrated he is a changemaker in transportation both in the community/industry at large, and a changemaker for many regional and local organizations trying to make their network safer.