I was at a meeting yesterday with several Twin Cities based traffic engineers. Several of us work primarily on traffic impact studies for development projects. None of us are overwhelmed with our amount of work, but all of us have several studies going. Definitely more projects than we had six months ago when the development industry seemed to be frozen.
This is totally unscientific, but it feels like the development world bottomed out in the Twin Cities over the last 18 months and we are starting to climb out of it. I'm not saying we're going back to the development pace of a few years ago (from my studies of the economy, that may have been a once in a generation peak), but hopefully we are moving to a new "normal" where we can get the laid off civil engineers back in the industry.