Dahir

Building a V2X Work Zone Tool From Scratch

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A first-person account of developing a Connected Work Zone platform for a state DOT — from R Shiny dashboards to federally-validated UPER binary encoding — with Claude AI as a coding partner.

The Starting Point: An R User With a V2X Problem

I’m a transportation engineer. My daily tools are R, GIS, and traffic models — not Python, not ASN.1, and definitely not binary encoding protocols. When a state DOT asked me to build a tool that could generate J2735-compliant Traveler Information Messages (TIMs) for connected vehicles, I didn’t know what UPER encoding was. I didn’t know that choiceID: 6 means absolute lat/lon coordinates. I didn’t know that a 620KB Python file generated from an ASN.1 schema would become the backbone of our encoding pipeline.

South Korea's High-Speed Bullet Train KTX-Eum

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

South Korea has started to move the needle on clean energy in the rail sector under “Green New Deal.” The government aims to reduce carbon emissions from rail industry by about 30 percent by phasing out its fleet of diesel trains by 2029.

Transport is the second largest source of emissions in the country.

South Korea’s diesel-only trains which generated 235,000 tons of emissions in 2019 alone are being replaced gradually with a new fleet of EMU-250 high-speed bullet trains.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Abdirashid Dahir

Advanced Mobility Engineer, HNTB Corporation | Columbus, OH

I am an advanced mobility engineer at HNTB Corporation based in Columbus, Ohio. My work focuses on electric vehicle deployment and intelligent transportation systems and connected/automated vehicle systems. I am currently building geospatial computational tools to determine the number of charging stations required to certify alternative fuel corridors in the states of Oklahoma and Indiana as fully built out based on multiple scenarios under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program. In addition, I am developing Connected Construction Work Zone tool to support intelligent transportation systems planning in Ohio.