About

I am a professional transportation planner who has worked in the industry since 1999, mostly in consulting. My passion for maps and cartography began with boredom in second grade. With the encouragement of my favorite elementary teacher, Ms. Lynn Barnett, I began studying and tracing maps of all kinds. In high school, my passion for maps fused with my interest in urban and transportation planning, and I began crafting maps and plans for expanded transit systems in Southern California. As time progressed, pencil, pen, and paper developed into GIS and Corel DRAW illustrations of my efforts.

In the summer of 1991, I began creating a map of a fictitious city patterned after San Francisco and the Bay Area using pencil on a rapidly expanding collection of sheets of graph paper that all fit together contiguously. The primary emphasis of this effort was to develop creative (yet realistic) transportation networks that include bike paths, streets, freeways, light rail, heavy rail, high speed rail, as well as airports. This map grew to a collection of over 260 pages over the following years to span the geographic equivalent of Santa Rosa in the north, Stockton and Sacramento in the east, and Santa Cruz in the south. In 2008, I began scanning every sheet of graph paper into digital png files and began putting them all together in Corel DRAW where I shaded cities various colors, traced the lines of transit and labeled all the freeways with numbered state and interstate highway designations patterned after those that exist in the Bay Area.