We’re pleased to announce the promotion of Kate Maker to Civil Engineering Practice Lead. Stepping up from the role of Deputy Director, Kate brings decades of experience leading projects throughout the country. Our Civil Engineering practice area is engaged in a wide range of projects at any given moment, from accessibility improvements and quick-build retrofits to intersection redesigns and full-scale roadway reconstructions. Kate is poised to guide the team’s continued success with bold vision and a steady hand.
Read on to learn about Kate’s new role and how she’s helping our civil engineers deliver excellence every day.
What are your priorities as Civil Engineering Practice Lead?
First and foremost, I’m focused on supporting and expanding the multidisciplinary collaboration that makes our projects so successful, getting engineers more involved in urban design and landscape architecture conversations and vice versa. As our engineering portfolio continues to grow dramatically each year, I’m also ensuring we’re shepherding projects along efficiently, delivering constructed projects on time and on budget.
It’s really about making sure our engineers are in the room with landscape architects, urban designers, and planners at overlapping points throughout the project.
Toole Design is a multidisciplinary firm. What does that look like from the engineering side?
It’s a balance — getting our engineers thinking about place and urban design, but not watering down the finely honed skills that make them great engineers. It’s really about making sure they’re in the room with landscape architects, urban designers, and planners at overlapping points throughout the project. Our engineering teams are involved early enough to understand the context and rationale behind design decisions so they can maintain the project’s integrity. In fact, we have a rule: we don’t move into engineering without everyone agreeing on the concept.
What’s one project you’re excited about right now?
Morrison Road in Denver is a $20 million construction project that’s primarily focused on traffic calming and pedestrian safety improvements. The existing intersection geometry is skewed, which makes the pedestrian crossings really long. It also results in a large turning radius on one side at every intersection, allowing vehicles to make very fast turns. To create safer and more comfortable conditions for pedestrians, we’re widening the sidewalk, adding lighting, and adding trees where we can. And we’re dead-ending two streets where we’ll create sidewalk-level plazas with raised crossings, which will be a great asset for the community.
In addition to solving some of the geometric challenges of this project, we’re also managing significant utility coordination and working on an accelerated delivery schedule. We’re also having intentional conversations about long-term maintenance responsibility and costs, working closely with the client and the maintenance district to ensure they can realistically maintain the corridor — and maintain the character of the neighborhood.
engineering projects vary enormously by jurisdiction. How do you keep your team delivering consistently?
Each new client brings a new learning curve, with different systems, standards, file types, and so on. Our deep bench of highly experienced engineers are skilled at applying national design standards and best practices in coordination with jurisdiction-specific requirements and expectations. We’ve worked hard to develop clear and repeatable internal processes to keep everyone in sync even as details vary from client to client.
What’s your favorite way to get around?
My husband and I love to walk everywhere. We recently walked two and a half miles to a concert!
