The federal government just pulled several evidence-backed tools out of the safety toolbox. USDOT and the Federal Highway Administration cut their list of Proven Safety Countermeasures from 28 to 23, removing bike lanes, speed safety cameras, and variable speed limits, among others. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy framed the move around federal grants he said had gone to “DEI bike lanes.” The removed measures carry documented results: FHWA’s own research has credited speed cameras with cutting crashes on urban arterials by as much as half, and separated bike lanes with reducing crashes roughly 30 percent on two-lane roads and 49 percent on four-lane roads. The list does not by itself move funding, but it is the reference local agencies and their consulting engineers lean on to justify safety designs and score competitive grant applications. Strip a countermeasure from the list and the federal warrant behind it gets weaker, which matters for the bike, transit, and complete-streets work already in motion across Minnesota. As one transportation-planning group put it, the change could “put lifesaving projects at risk.”
Source: NPR, July 16
ENG Minneapolis approved the Lyndale Avenue redesign the same week Washington delisted its tools. The City Council signed off July 16 on a reconstruction that adds separated bikeways and sidewalks and calms traffic at the LynLake intersection, which the council called the highest-injury intersection in the city. The design removes about 24 percent of on-street parking, the point business owners fought hardest. Construction is roughly two years out and will run another two to three years once it starts, so the engineering, right-of-way, and staging work sits squarely in firms’ near-term pipeline. The local direction here runs opposite the federal one in today’s lead: the same separated-bikeway approach FHWA just removed from its list is what the county and city are building.
Source: CBS Minnesota, July 16
ENG A Midtown Manhattan conversion nearly collapsed, and the lesson is about temporary works. On July 7, workers converting the 37-story former Pfizer headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street to luxury apartments found columns buckling on the 21st floor; floors 21 through 26 began to deform, and surrounding buildings evacuated. The Department of Buildings set up interior and exterior monitoring, and the building received roughly two dozen complaints over the prior year. Reporting has raised the theory that required column reinforcement was never installed, but the cause is still under investigation and no finding is public yet. The transferable point for firms is process: an approved drawing set and a special-inspection regime do not substitute for field verification, and the temporary condition during a heavy structural retrofit has to be engineered as its own complete system.
Sources: ABC7 New York, July 7; Construction Magazine, July 2026
BIZ Two new reports frame AI as a business-model question for engineering firms, not just a productivity tool. McKinsey estimates AI could unlock roughly $228 billion a year in U.S. architecture, engineering, and construction value by 2030 and could automate about half of nonphysical A/E work. Its sharper point is competitive: construction-sector productivity grew about 0.4 percent a year from 2000 to 2022 while manufacturing grew about 3 percent, and the firms that capture AI’s gains will be the ones that shift from billing hours toward pricing outcomes and that own their project data rather than hand it off. A parallel MIT experiment tempers the hype. Undergraduates using AI copilots to design jet engines found the tools strong at research and synthesis but unable to do the design itself, with engineering judgment and experience still decisive. One student’s summary: AI “can’t do design.” The near-term read is to pilot AI on synthesis and documentation while protecting judgment, data, and how the work is priced.
Sources: McKinsey, July 15; MIT News, July 14
WORKFORCE Three forces are tightening the talent squeeze on firms at once. Worker sentiment about staying put has fallen to its lowest level in a year. Eagle Hill Consulting’s employee retention index slipped 1.3 points to 104.2 in the second quarter, and the analysis pins the drop on pay and a renewed belief among workers that better options exist elsewhere. Millennials posted the steepest decline, down 6.1 points, and they now fill the mid-career and leadership roles firms count on; as Eagle Hill’s CEO put it, retention risk rises “even inside organizations with strong cultures.” The second force is AI, with McKinsey arguing that automating entry-level research and documentation strips out the work that used to season juniors into trusted engineers, putting the future bench at risk unless firms deliberately rebuild that training. The third is management structure: as firms widen each manager’s span of control, the supervisory work stays put and lands on fewer people. For principals, keeping high-potential talent has become a business-planning priority for the year, owned at the top of the firm.
Sources: Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, July 17; McKinsey, July 14
ENG MnDOT has a run of consultant solicitations closing over the next two weeks. Three open procurements carry near-term deadlines: planning and readiness advancement for the Corridors of Commerce work on Highway 15 between Highway 23 and Highway 10 is due July 21; construction engineering for the TH 77 Minnesota River bridge rehabilitation is due July 24; and final design for the unbonded concrete overlay on southbound US 52 near Oronoco is due July 28. A pre-qualified letter-of-interest for a Wabasha Bridge vessel-collision study closes today. The mix of planning, bridge, and pavement work spread across greater Minnesota is a read on where the department is spending professional-technical dollars this summer.
Source: MnDOT Professional/Technical Consultant Notices, July 2026
Proven Safety Countermeasures. FHWA’s curated set of roadway safety treatments backed by strong crash-reduction evidence, promoted to state and local agencies as go-to tools. Because the list functions as a federal stamp of effectiveness, agencies and their engineers cite it to justify design choices and to strengthen grant applications, which is why adding or removing a treatment carries weight well beyond the web page it lives on.
Build your bench: ACEC Minnesota’s Leadership Development Series for mid-career professionals runs September 2026 through April 2027 in a 24-person cohort, and the four-session Emerging Leaders program for early-career staff runs this October and November.
The (Almost) Daily Brief publishes most weekdays: policy, funding, workforce, and industry news for Minnesota’s engineering firms, in a few minutes of reading.
