Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Urban Transport Intern

🎯 Role Definition

An Urban Transport Intern works alongside senior transport planners, engineers and data analysts to support planning, analysis, and delivery of urban mobility projects. This role focuses on collecting, processing, and interpreting transport data (ridership, traffic counts, GPS/AVL traces), producing GIS maps and visualizations, contributing to travel demand and network modelling, and helping deliver community engagement, policy analysis and pilot evaluations for sustainable mobility initiatives. The position is ideal for proactive learners who can translate technical outputs into clear stakeholder-ready reports and presentations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Undergraduate or graduate student in Urban Planning, Transportation Engineering, Geography, Data Science, Economics, or Environmental Science.
Recent graduate with project coursework or independent transport-related research.
Junior data analyst or GIS technician transitioning into transport sector.

Advancement To:

Transport Planner / Mobility Planner
Transport Data Analyst / Travel Demand Modeller
Public Transit Analyst or Transit Operations Coordinator
Project Manager — Mobility & Infrastructure
Policy Analyst — Transport and Sustainable Mobility

Lateral Moves:

Urban Designer or Urban Policy Analyst
GIS Analyst or Spatial Data Scientist
Environmental Impact / Sustainability Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Assist senior transport planners and engineers in preparing and calibrating travel demand and network models, including data ingestion, validation, scenario design, and documenting assumptions for land-use and transport interactions.
Collect, clean, and analyze large transport datasets (automatic passenger counts, AVL/GPS traces, smartcard/ridership data, origin-destination surveys and traffic counts), producing reproducible workflows and annotated code for future use.
Create high-quality GIS maps and spatial analyses using QGIS or ArcGIS for corridor studies, accessibility assessments, transit catchment areas, and visualization of equity impacts across neighborhoods.
Develop data dashboards and interactive visualizations (Power BI, Tableau, or web-based mapping) to communicate ridership trends, on-time performance and service reliability metrics to planners and stakeholders.
Support design and evaluation of pilot projects for micro-mobility, on-demand services, bus priority measures and bike infrastructure through before/after analysis, KPI measurement and lessons-learned reports.
Run and interpret basic simulation and microsimulation models (SUMO, VISSIM, or comparable tools) under the guidance of senior modellers to assess operational scenarios and signal timing changes.
Prepare literature reviews, policy briefs and benchmarking reports on topics such as Mobility-as-a-Service, congestion pricing, low-emission zones and first/last-mile solutions to inform strategy development.
Assist with demand forecasting tasks including trip generation, mode choice and assignment steps; support sensitivity testing and prepare scenario comparison summaries for decision-makers.
Design, implement and process on-board and intercept surveys, household travel surveys or online questionnaires; perform statistical analysis on responses and present recruitment and sampling limitations.
Conduct accessibility and equity analyses to quantify travel times to essential services (jobs, healthcare, schools) and evaluate distributional impacts of proposed network changes.
Support stakeholder engagement activities including preparation of materials for public meetings, workshops and community consultations, capturing feedback and ensuring it is incorporated into project documentation.
Produce clear, structured technical memos, presentations and executive summaries that translate quantitative results into actionable policy recommendations for internal and external audiences.
Prepare GIS layers, metadata and geodatabase documentation to ensure project data is organized, discoverable and can be reused by other teams or future interns.
Assist with procurement and tendering documentation for technical studies and pilot vendors, including scope development, cost comparisons and evaluation criteria under supervision.
Conduct cost–benefit, basic economic appraisal and performance indicator analyses for small projects or pilot implementations, documenting assumptions and sensitivity ranges.
Support operational data quality assurance by developing checks, flags and corrective procedures for transport sensor and ticketing datasets to improve reliability of downstream analyses.
Coordinate and participate in fieldwork and site visits for traffic counts, spot-checks, infrastructure audits, and pilot monitoring, ensuring safety protocols and data collection standards are followed.
Help integrate multi-modal datasets (walking, cycling, transit, private vehicles, shared mobility) to produce combined mode-share analyses and identify gaps in network connectivity.
Assist in preparing grant applications, funding proposals and progress reports by compiling technical inputs, cost estimates and performance targets aligned with funder requirements.
Support the monitoring and evaluation of project KPIs, producing monthly/quarterly scorecards and highlighting trends, risks and recommended remedial actions to project leads.
Maintain project documentation, code repositories, version control (Git) and task trackers to support reproducibility, transparency and handover at the end of the internship.
Provide day-to-day administrative and research support to multidisciplinary teams, coordinating meetings, drafting minutes and tracking action items to keep projects on schedule.
Identify opportunities to automate repetitive workflows (data cleaning scripts, ETL pipelines) and implement proof-of-concept tools that reduce manual effort for the team.
Contribute to safety, inclusivity and quality assurance checks on proposed interventions to ensure proposals align with road safety, accessibility and local policy objectives.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist in maintaining and updating public-facing project pages, datasets and visual resources for transparency and stakeholder access.
Help mentor or train new interns/summer students on standard data processing and GIS practices where appropriate.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proficient in GIS tools (QGIS or ArcGIS) for mapping, spatial analysis and producing cartographic outputs optimized for reports and web publishing.
Experience with data analysis in Python (pandas, geopandas), R (tidyverse) or equivalent languages for cleaning, aggregating and visualizing transport datasets.
Familiarity with SQL for querying relational databases, extracting ridership and operational metrics from ticketing or AVL systems.
Basic knowledge of travel demand modelling concepts (trip generation, mode choice, assignment) and hands-on experience with modelling software or scripts is a plus.
Ability to develop charts and dashboards using Power BI, Tableau, or similar tools to turn complex data into stakeholder-ready insights.
Experience handling transport datasets such as GPS/AVL traces, smartcard/ticketing records, traffic count data or origin-destination matrices.
Familiarity with transport simulation tools (SUMO, VISSIM) or willingness to learn microsimulation concepts for operations analysis.
Competence in Excel including pivot tables, advanced formulas and sensitivity analysis for budgetary and KPI work.
Knowledge of survey design and statistical analysis packages (R, Stata or Python stats libraries) for travel behaviour research.
Experience with version control (Git) and reproducible scripting practices to maintain transparent analytical workflows.
Basic understanding of accessibility analysis methods and equity indicators for transport planning.
Familiarity with visualization of geospatial data on the web (Leaflet, Mapbox, or similar) is advantageous.
Exposure to cost–benefit analysis, transport economics concepts or project appraisal frameworks is desirable.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate technical analyses into clear messages for non-technical stakeholders.
Analytical mindset with attention to detail and a commitment to data quality and reproducibility.
Collaborative team player who thrives in multidisciplinary settings and values stakeholder engagement and feedback.
Proactive self-starter who can manage competing priorities, meet deadlines and escalate risks appropriately.
Curiosity and learning orientation; comfortable asking questions, seeking mentorship and rapidly acquiring new technical skills.
Problem-solving and critical thinking, able to structure ambiguous problems and recommend practical next steps.
Respect for diversity, equity and inclusion principles when designing and assessing transport interventions.
Adaptability to dynamic project needs and willingness to participate in fieldwork or community meetings when required.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Currently enrolled in or recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning, Transportation Engineering, Civil Engineering, Geography, Data Science, Economics, Environmental Science or a closely related discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (or current enrollee) in Transport Planning, Urban Planning, Transport Engineering, GIS, or Applied Data Science with transport-specific coursework or project experience preferred.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Urban and Regional Planning
Transportation / Civil Engineering
Geography and GIS
Data Science / Applied Statistics
Economics (transport or urban economics)
Environmental Science / Sustainability

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

0–2 years (suitable for students, recent graduates, or candidates with 1–2 internships/projects in transport-related roles)

Preferred:

Prior internship or project experience supporting transport planning, GIS mapping, data analysis or public transit operations.
Coursework or capstone projects involving travel demand modelling, transport simulation, accessibility analysis, or mobility pilot evaluations.
Experience coordinating small field deployments (traffic counts, intercept surveys) and participating in stakeholder engagement activities.