TRP spotlight: Tim Peters

Tim Peters has been with IDOT for 23 years and has worked in a number of departments and organizations within that agency.

In that time, he has had the opportunity to serve as a TRP chair or member on many different ICT projects and has lent his expertise to a variety of topics, offering valuable insight to the panels on which he has served.

Officially, Peters is the Local Policy and Technology Engineer in IDOT’s Central Bureau of Local Roads and Streets. He has been with IDOT since 1992, serving in the Bureau of Operations as Communications Systems Engineer, Equipment Engineer, and Winter Operations Engineer before moving into his current role in 2014.

Peters recently chaired ICT project R27-094, “Performance Evaluation of Snow and Ice Plows,” an important project given the cost that IDOT incurs dealing with winter weather and clearing the roads across the state. The purpose of this project was to evaluate different types of plow blades and different plowing practices and strategies to come up with best practices in dealing with those pieces of equipment.

“Tim was a valuable asset to our project,” says Principal Investigator Souhail Elhouar, “As the project TRP chair, he was very supportive and very effective in giving the research team a good sense of direction early on in the project. He did this by sharing his wealth of knowledge about the topic of snow and ice control and providing the research team with some of the main sources they used to perform their literature review. He also was instrumental in connecting the research team with the right people to conduct the surveys dealing with best practices in snow and ice control. Mr. Peters was an outstanding TRP chair for this project.”

Another research project for which Peters served as TRP chair is R27-147, “Development of Chloride Reduction Training,” the goal of which was to educate snow plow operators on the effects of salt used to melt ice in the winter and instruct them on the optimal amount to achieve the desired effects.

Principal Investigator on R27-147, Wilfrid Nixon, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, says, “Tim is a consummate professional and is great to work with. He makes sure that the project keeps on time and on target, and helps to avoid ‘mission creep,’ which is very important for the project panel chair to do. He helps to clarify expectations as well and is very thorough when going through reports. All in all, it was a great pleasure to work with Tim, and I hope to work with him again in the future.”

Peters will also soon serve as chair for a recently announced project, R27-174, which will examine ways to evaluate seal coat, gravel, and dirt roads—a key part of rural Illinois infrastructure.

He obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Iowa in 1985, and he received his MBA from the University of Northern Colorado in 1987. He has served or currently serves on TRP panels for six additional ICT projects, including projects on software simulations of weather information systems, theoretical design of flexible pavement, guidelines for dealing with pedestrians in places without lights and crosswalks, and analysis of LED streetlights.