Walking
Rolling
Biking
Riding Transit
Connecting
We Put
People
Walking
Rolling
Biking
Riding Transit
Connecting
First

Move your community forward.

Multimodal Planning and Engineering · Safety Action Plans · Active Transportation · Parking · Curb Management · Transportation Demand Management · Transit Priority · Strategic Planning · Development Impacts Analysis · Station Area Planning · Transit Oriented Development

Put good things in motion. We'll help your community become more resilient to climate change, reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities, and move people more safely and efficiently on our streets and sidewalks. We’ll equip you with innovative analytic tools and inclusive engagement strategies to articulate goals, examine impacts, understand community needs, and build consensus, so your plans become reality and your projects get funded and built.

Cities, Towns, and Regions

Design transit with purpose.

COAs and Bus Network Redesigns · Bus Rapid Transit · Microtransit · Transit Master Plans · Scheduling · Paratransit · Fare Policy · Zero Emission Fleets · Bus Stop Optimization · Station Access

Align your transit services with the people who rely on you most. From well-defined routes and services to accessible bus stops and transit priority corridors, we take a comprehensive, collaborative, and creative approach. With support from the largest transit team in the industry, enhance your capacity to do more for your riders. Let's create a plan that gets your community on board.

Transit Providers

Create great places and happy commutes.

Commute Program Management · TDM Policy and Implementation · Campus Master Plans  · Parking Policy and Management · Bike and Pedestrian Access · Development Entitlement Support

Make your destination the place people want to be by helping them travel with less traffic—by foot, transit, ride-hail, and bike. Vibrant places make space for people, not just vehicles, so rethink parking and inspire residents and employees with better transportation amenities. We’ll help you match equitable mobility with sustainable land use and design to create places and commutes that spark joy.

Campuses and Developments

What we can do for you

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MBTA Bus Priority Toolkit
Bellevue Curb Management Plan
CapMetro Equitable TOD Policy Plan

Our Vision

All people have access to sustainable, safe, and dignified transportation options that enhance their communities and connect them to the people they love and to the places they want to be.

Our Values

Excellence
We bring passion, technical expertise, creativity, and quality to all we do. We are leaders in our field.
Inclusivity
We embrace and celebrate our diversity. We make space for new voices and create a culture of trust and belonging where everyone can thrive.
Boldness
We are brave, curious, humble, and open to change. We ask hard questions, we innovate, and we push to dismantle inequities each day.
Compassion
We care about people, their experiences, and their needs. We listen and respond with empathy, always putting people first.
Commitment
We are accountable to each other, our clients, and our communities. We hold to our vision, we operate transparently, we do what we say we will do, and we make progress together.
Joy
We love what we do. We learn and grow as collaborators, we celebrate each other and our work, and we laugh together.
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Excellence
Inclusivity
Boldness
Compassion
Commitment
Joy

Our Story

From two visionary women to 160+ transportation trailblazers
"As a kid, I was always interested in transportation. Aside from my fascination with riding buses, I was always asking my parents questions about things like how the traffic signal knows when a car is waiting or how potholes are formed. I landed in the public transit realm after realizing how important transportation options were after being without a car in college."
Kyle Taniguchi
Seattle
Senior Associate
"I have always been annoyingly passionate about public health. I did my public health studies in Hong Kong and took a course called Social Epidemiology focusing on the social determinants of health: where we live, how we live, our relationships and how they impact our health. My public health career started in communicable disease prevention, but I kept thinking about how the design of our built environments can add or take years off our lives. Eventually, I went back to school for urban planning, so now I can be annoying about planning, too."
Fiona Ko
Portland
Associate
"I was a kid in a car-free household who wanted to design cars, and I became a bicycle courier, full-time engineering student, and part-time bike racer. Traveling outside of the U.S., I realized how our car culture fed our communities’ inequalities. That led me to fighting for bike lanes in underserved communities, heading up a bike education program in a low-income Black neighborhood, and growing a transit advocacy organization in Cleveland to lower fares."
Marvin Ranaldson
San Francisco
Senior Associate
"In high school, none of my friends could drive, and we lived in the suburbs, so everything was spread out. My best friend learned how to use the transit system in LA, and she taught me how to pay for the fare and which side of the platform to stand on to make sure we were going in the right direction. I remember looking at the route map and being blown away. There were so many places you could go using transit, and you could skip the atrocious driving downtown."
Karen La
Los Angeles
Associate
"Growing up in Colorado Springs, we’d often venture to Denver to see the 'big city.' At first, I was enamored with the scale and complexity of the highway system—flyovers and bridges everywhere. When the Central LRT line opened in 1994, it changed my perception of everything. Riding in a train to get downtown was profound, and I as I got older, I just wanted to understand how and why cities were the way they were. That led to the discovery of city planning as a profession, and I’ve been hooked ever since."
Ryan Billings
Denver
Principal
"I’ve always loved looking at maps and building plans. For a while I wanted to be an architect growing up, but planning appealed to me because of how interdisciplinary the field is. The balance between imagining what could be better about the world and determining what’s feasible to implement makes the work both challenging and rewarding."
Sarah Hyden
Austin
Associate
"I've always been intrigued by the many varieties of transit vehicles, specifically buses, and as fate would have it, a mechanic for the local transit agency lived just a few houses away during my childhood. On most Saturdays, my neighbor Mr. Byrd, test-drove the Neoplan and Orion V buses that he repaired in the neighborhood. I have many fond memories of being in the driver’s seat and setting the destination roll-signs to the wackiest combinations. After realizing the connection between city design and transit, I completed undergraduate studies in an urban and public affairs program, and I take great pride in turning this childhood entertainment into a fulfilling transit career."
Anthony Breaker
Chicago
Senior Scheduling Associate
"I commuted via the E/F train from Queens to Manhattan every day in high school, so I’ve always loved trains. I went into college wanting to study climate change, and I realized the best way to address carbon emissions was to do everything possible to get cars off the road."
James Zhang
Atlanta
Associate
"I love to play with data, and I love critical thinking. So, I did my doctoral degree in econometric modeling using transportation data."
Bibhas Dey
Orlando
Modeler
"When I moved to DC, I got involved in local transportation advocacy; I first sat on the citizen’s advisory committee for DC’s transportation planning board and then the Bicycle Advisory Council as a ward representative. I took my role in these groups so seriously; I was treating it like a job. And that’s when I knew that transportation planning was the logical place for a passionate planning (and biking) nerd like me. Nelson\Nygaard is a place where I can do what I love for work while helping people love how they get around."
Emily Oaksford
Washington, DC
Senior Associate
"When my family first moved to the U.S., we relied on the bus to get around. I spent a huge proportion of my time growing up waiting to transfer to a bus that only came every 30 minutes. Seattle’s light rail construction also directly impacted my family. We had to close down our first restaurant in Capitol Hill, since it was right next to the station construction site. I know firsthand the power of public transit to improve access to jobs and social services, but also the harm of its unintended consequences. Transit can be a major environmental and economic solution, but only if it’s done right, and I would like to be a part of doing it right."
Yanisa Techagumthorn
New York
Senior Associate
"I grew up in a very rural agricultural town, where the primary way to get around town was to drive. I would ride my bike several miles along dangerous roads to school or into town (meaning, the local CVS). I often dreamed of living in a walkable downtown area where everything was accessible without a car."
Kelsey Tustin
Boston
Associate

Transportation moves us. At Nelson\Nygaard, we inspire, plan, and design mobility solutions that support equitable, accessible, healthy, sustainable, and thriving communities. We're a team of 160 planners, engineers, data scientists, and designers in 13 offices across the United States. Founded by women in 1987, we’ve grown to better represent the diversity of the communities in which we work. What unites us is our belief that transportation is how we can change the world. We start by putting people first.

Seattle
Portland
San Francisco
& Oakland
Los Angeles
Denver
Austin
Chicago
Atlanta
Orlando
Washington, DC
New York
Boston

Join Our Team

Opportunities