Project Experience

Since December 2020, Justin Barrett has been working with the Trans Mountain Expansion Project as the Traffic Engineer of Record.  His primary responsibility has been to create safe accesses to the pipeline right-of-way from the adjacent public roadways, including major highways and urban arterials throughout British Columbia.  

Justin is also involved in developing traffic considerations and access design drawings to assist with obtaining permits for new access points required for construction.  He frequently reviews issues to ensure that pipeline construction activities are either beyond the clear zone of the roadway or designing roadside barrier systems to protect both the travelling public and construction crews.  He has been working with a team at ATS Traffic on this project, coordinating and delegating work with a team of senior engineers and EIT's to complete the required tasks.  

While this is a major project that takes a lot of Justin's time, he is still able to balance his responsibilities with Trans Mountain and his other clients.  Much of the work for Trans Mountain is in British Columbia and Justin's experience with remote working since 2013 has been very beneficial in allowing him to utilise online resources and partnering with field staff to successfully complete his duties for TMEP without compromising his time on other projects.

As of June 2023, Justin's contract with TMEP has been completed; the project had reached 90% mechanical completion with 100% expected to be at the end of September 2023.   At the time his contract was complete, Justin had overseen the completion of the pipeline in Alberta and the reactivation sections in British Columbia, as well as the major challenges at Mountains 2 and 3 where unique traffic management plans were required to allow crews to blast and scale before the pipeline could be installed.   

In September 2022, JCB was invited to join a team with Powerloop Consulting and Black & McDonald to provide traffic control services during construction of the Valley Line West Light Rail Transit (LRT) project in the City of Edmonton, Alberta.   Justin's role on this project is to analyse the operation of the intersections along the LRT route during construction and develop signal timings that would be used to keep traffic moving at the impacted intersections.

This project involves coordination with the work Black & McDonald is doing in the field and the layouts that Powerloop are designing.  Modelling and anlaysing traffic signals during construction involves having to compromise on delay and capacity, as many of these intersections were operating at near capacity prior to construction.  This makes creating the traffic signal timings a delicate balance, as even a few seconds of green time one way or the other can result in a failure for a critical movement.  Justin documents all of his assumptions at each step of the process and provides transparent calculations to show how he arrived at a final signal timing for each intersection, which shows why the timings are considered optimal even when the operations at the intersection are not.

Almost 20 years ago, Justin was involved in the planning for what would become the Valley Line West LRT, developing functional plans to extend the City of Edmonton's rail transit service from downtown to West Edmonton Mall and then out to Anthony Henday Drive at the edge of the city.  Now, he gets to work on the construction of a project he helped plan many years ago.