Conference life in transportation safety isn’t all PowerPoint slides and exhibit halls. When you spend a year traveling to seven cities for industry events, you collect moments — the kind that don’t make it into the session proceedings but make the work feel real.
This is the visual side of 2025: the cities, the venues, the after-hours explorations, and the small moments between the sessions that made each conference memorable.
The Cities
One of the unexpected perks of attending conferences across the country is seeing America’s cities through a professional lens. As someone who works in transportation safety, I can’t walk a city street without noticing the infrastructure — the crosswalk markings, the signal timing, the bike lane treatments. Every city becomes a case study.
Denver
Memphis
Annapolis
Pittsburgh
Denver greeted us with a late-March snowstorm that turned the downtown into a postcard. Memphis had the Peabody Hotel — if you haven’t seen the duck march, put it on your list. Annapolis was all brick sidewalks and sailing culture. And Pittsburgh’s steel-and-glass skyline is a masterclass in urban reinvention.
After Hours
The best conference conversations happen outside the conference center. Over dinners, walking city streets, visiting local landmarks — that’s when people talk openly about their challenges, their frustrations with current tools, and what they wish existed.
Niagara Falls — Buffalo
Falls at Night
Buffalo’s conference had the best side trip of the year — Niagara Falls is 20 minutes from the city, and seeing it lit up at night is genuinely breathtaking. It’s the kind of thing that makes the travel grind worth it.
Fenway Park — Boston
Pacers Arena — Indianapolis
Boston during ATSIP week meant catching a Red Sox game at Fenway. Indianapolis meant checking out the Pacers’ arena. These aren’t just perks — they’re the moments that recharge you between intensive conference days.
The Venues
Conference venues range from generic hotel ballrooms to genuinely inspiring spaces. Indianapolis gets top marks for 2025 — the conference sessions were held near the Indiana State Capitol, with its stunning stained-glass dome that I couldn’t stop photographing.
The dome in Indianapolis — a reminder that infrastructure can be beautiful, not just functional.
The Booth Life
Setting up the Roadway Insights booth became a familiar ritual across seven conferences. Unpack the banner, arrange the table, power up the demo laptop, and get ready for conversations. Each setup is slightly different — bigger spaces at national conferences, cozier corners at regional meetings — but the energy is always the same.
NPC Denver
ITE Buffalo
The booth conversations are the whole reason we’re there. Every “can it do X?” is a product insight. Every “we’ve been struggling with Y” is a validation. And every business card exchanged is a relationship that might turn into a partnership months down the road.
The Steel City Send-Off
Ending the conference year in Pittsburgh — the Steel City delivered.
The final conference of 2025 was GSA in Pittsburgh. Ending the year in a city known for reinventing itself felt fitting. Transportation safety is going through its own reinvention — from reactive to proactive, from siloed to integrated, from consultant-dependent to self-service. We’re building for that future.