About

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. My fascination with transit data, open source software, and in transportation engineering started with countless hours riding buses to and from high school and work. I noticed everything: inaccessible bus stops in the winter, schedules that were more aspiration than promise, and systems that felt designed by people who’d never actually used them.

What I believe:

• Mobility is freedom. Nobody should find their movement constrained by unreliable systems, whether they travel by car, bus, train, bike, or mobility device.
• Good transit creates good places. Communities with fast, punctual transit and thoughtful spaces for walking and cycling become places people want to live, not just endure.
• There is no perfect transportation system. 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 rapid transit 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).

Awards

• Kurt and Marianne Strobele Engineering Award
• Ontario Professional Engineers Foundation for Education Scholarship
• TAC Foundation Scholarship
• ITE Canada Undergraduate Scholarship
• Stantec Future Leaders Scholarship
• WTS Strategic Partner Scholarship
• WTS Toronto Chapter Scholarship

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