September 14, 2026
Carrie O’Neill and Utah Traffic Signal Design:
What the O'Neill & Company Acquisition Means for Clients
There’s a motto Carrie O’Neill has run her firm on for more than a decade:
“We will do what we say we will do.”
It’s not a tagline. It’s just how she’s operated since she opened O’Neill & Company in 2012, and it’s exactly why more than 30 years of transportation engineering experience, a client list built almost entirely on trust, and a tight-knit team of traffic signal designers are now part of Horner & Shifrin through the firm’s acquisition of O’Neill & Company, with Carrie leading them as Vice President, Regional Manager. For her clients, the short version is this: same leader, same team, same people answering the phone.
Still Building: From LEGO to the Signal Gal
Carrie didn’t set out to become one of the go-to traffic engineers in the Mountain West. She started in the airline industry before college, then realized what she actually loved was building things, a habit that traces back to playing with LEGO with her brothers growing up. She focused on civil engineering, graduated from Fresno State as one of only a handful of women in her class, went to work for Caltrans, and then landed in Utah.
Somewhere along the way, she earned a nickname that’s followed her ever since: the Signal Gal.
She has personally designed more than 500 traffic signals across Utah. She also helps maintain the state’s traffic signal standards and materials catalog, the reference every other signal designer in Utah works from. Behind both is a relationship with the Utah Department of Transportation, spanning all four of its regions, and so many cities, counties, and developers along the way.
Why She Went Out on Her Own
In 2012, Carrie made the leap to start her own firm. Her reasoning was simple: she wanted to build a place where people were treated like people, and where she set that tone herself.
That philosophy shows up everywhere in how O’Neill & Company operates: weekly project meetings over lunch; flexibility to leave early for a kid’s tennis match, or take a Utah winter afternoon on the mountain, once the work is done; an ongoing and concerted effort to get her designers licensed as PEs, something she credits with opening doors in her own career.
It also shows up in how her clients keep coming back; a reputation built on consistent follow-through, project after project, for more than a decade.
Why Carrie Chose Horner & Shifrin
When it came time to think about what came next for her firm, Carrie took her time. This is the kind of decision that doesn’t get made lightly when your name and your team’s livelihood are tied to it.
What ultimately made Horner & Shifrin the right fit, in her words, came down to a few things:
A gap that actually fits. Traffic signal design is a specialty O’Neill & Company has spent more than a decade building, and it complements rather than duplicates what Horner & Shifrin already does.
Culture match. Employee ownership stood out to her immediately — the people doing the work have a stake in how it turns out — along with a benefits philosophy she saw as comparable to her own.
Staying power. She pointed to the firm’s tenure, people who’ve built long careers at Horner & Shifrin, as proof of a company that invests in its people the way she has.
Broader project support. On larger projects that call for other disciplines, Horner & Shifrin brings those capabilities in-house. In practical terms: a signal project for an O’Neill & Company client can now grow into a corridor project without the client having to assemble a new team.
As Carrie says simply, “I think it’s a win-win for everyone.”
What’s Not Changing
This isn’t a story about a firm disappearing into a bigger one. It’s the same team, the same leader, working with the same clients, now with more bench strength behind them.
Carrie’s own resume in Utah goes back more than 30 years, to projects she worked on earlier in her career: the first I-15 design-build project, traffic camera infrastructure for the 2002 Winter Olympics, and concept design on 42 intersections along UTA’s original TRAX line. That experience stays on the same projects, for the same clients, with the same person accountable for it.
Carrie will continue to lead the Salt Lake City office, now as Vice President, Regional Manager. Her entire team has come over with her: John Allan, building out roadway and trail work; Leslie Calderwood, her second-ever hire and a 30-year friend, who runs the on-call support work that’s been central to the UDOT relationship for years; Regis Chen, who has more than four decades in lighting design; and a bench of designers already being mentored toward PE licensure and eventually running their own projects.
The UDOT relationship (active projects across multiple regions, signal synchronization work with Salt Lake County, ongoing support contracts, and a role helping maintain the state’s traffic signal standards and materials catalog) doesn’t reset. It just gets a bigger platform underneath it.
What’s Next for Horner & Shifrin in Salt Lake City
Carrie’s already thinking ahead. The 2034 Winter Olympics are on her radar, echoing the work she did on traffic infrastructure in 2002. She wants to branch out beyond UDOT into more municipal and county work, and the Horner & Shifrin platform gives her more room to pursue it. The Salt Lake City office is also the firm’s first in the Western United States and the anchor of its West Region, where H&S is putting its growth.
Carrie spent more than a decade building something worth protecting. Nothing about that changes today — except how much she and her team can take on.