Tyler Koontz is Vice President, Commercial at AWP Safety, which sets up and removes roughly a million work zones a year across North America for utility, broadband, and transportation customers.

He came to traffic control from enterprise transformation work — leading change management at Wells Fargo, advising through Gartner, and running commercial strategy at a network automation software company — and has spent the past three years applying that lens to work zones. The pattern he found: traffic control is typically ordered days before crews mobilize, long after the decisions that determine roadside risk have already been locked in.

His work focuses on moving that engagement upstream into design and planning, and on what it takes operationally — site data, risk-informed plan development, and field verification — to reduce serious injuries and fatalities in work zones.