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This is the Traffic Engineering Brain — a working operating system for going from entry-level EIT to a strong Florida traffic engineer. Part of it arrives pre-filled: core references, workflows, and worked examples. The rest is deliberately scaffolded, because notes you write yourself are the ones you retrieve under pressure; the system’s job is to make writing them take 90 seconds, not to hand you a textbook you’ll never reread.

The operating loop

The Brain runs on a simple rhythm anyone can adopt:

• Capture (all day): anything worth keeping goes into an inbox or a daily log. Don’t file, don’t format. See Daily Capture Routine.
• Weekly (Friday, 20 min): Weekly Review Routine — empty the inbox into real notes, log lessons, queue questions for senior engineers.
• Monthly (last Friday, 45 min): Monthly Technical Growth Review — take honest stock of skills, pick next month’s focus.
• Per project: open a project note on day one; close it out with written lessons learned.

Where everything lives

Content is organized in numbered folders, 00–22. Each numbered folder now opens with a curated hub page — click the folder itself and you land on it — indexing what’s built and what’s planned; the old separate MOC - notes have folded into these hubs (old links still resolve). 00 System runs the machine — routines, QA/QC, lessons learned. 02 References holds the core manuals (FDM, Standard Plans, MUTCD, Greenbook, HCM, HSM, and the rest), each with what/why/when and links. 03 Agencies is the Florida jurisdiction library. Folders 04 onward are knowledge domains — safety and calming, parking, signals, TIA, design and CAD, software, automation, data sources, research, reports, PM, AI, and career; start with the hub when entering a domain. The remaining numbered folders — templates (sheet 01 included), projects, daily logs, inbox — are private working space that lives in the private vault and isn’t published here. How This Vault Works covers the naming, tagging, and linking conventions. Worked examples are marked ★ throughout.

Rules of the vault

1. Verify before you rely. Anything tagged #status/verify (statute numbers, manual editions, URLs) gets checked against the current official source before it touches real work. Log the date in the note’s last-checked field.
2. Official sources decide; everything else teaches. Source classes 1–2 (official/professional) for engineering judgment; classes 3–7 (tutorials, examples, Reddit, GitHub, opinion) for learning only. See Workflow - Research and Source Vetting.
3. An EIT does not sign, seal, or make final engineering decisions. When in doubt → EIT Boundaries Ethics and Liability → ask the PE.
4. Links rot. Every reference note has a last-checked date. Standards Update Tracker tells you what to re-check quarterly.