Harold M. Raynor is a native of North Carolina and was raised in the Tidewater Area of the Old Dominion, and is a longtime resident of Gulf Shores, Alabama. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve serving during the Vietnam era and is a Life Member of American Legion Post No. 1983.
Harold received civil and transportation engineering degree from Virginia Tech in 1962, and was a member of The Kappa Alpha Order, the Student Chapters of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Road Builders Association for which he served as Chapter President in 1961. He is a Life Member of the VA Tech Alumni Association and in 2012 was inducted into The Old Guard Association. In 2014 he was inducted into the VA Tech Legacy Society and the Loyal Order of Kappa Alpha.
Encouraged by his grandfather, Harold loved golf from a very young age. He was a child prodigy of the famed Tommy Galloway an Irish golf professional at the Hermitage Country Club in Richmond, VA. Harold evolved into an accomplished amateur golfer winning a number of scholastic and collegiate championships. He was a Founding Member of Craft Farms Cotton Creek Club in Gulf Shores and was previously a member of Hermitage Country Club, Carolina Golf Club in Charlotte, NC and Gulf Shores Golf Club.
While a participant in the Bubby Worsham Memorial Junior Golf Tournament in the Bethesda, Maryland area in the 50’s, Harold had a chance meeting with Henry A. Barnes that would later shape his adult professional traffic engineering career. Barnes was a famous municipal traffic engineer and traffic commissioner who served in a number of U.S. cities, including Flint, Denver, Baltimore and New York City. Barnes was responsible for a number of traffic engineering innovations, including the Barnes Dance and Green Wave of coordinated traffic signals as well as the application of actuated traffic signals (signal displays triggered by the detected presence of a vehicle or pedestrian). Along with Herman J. Hoose of Charlotte, NC, Mr. Barnes was one of Harold’s closest career mentors until his untimely death in 1968.
Harold served as Assistant City Traffic Engineer in Greensboro, NC; Director of Traffic and Transportation City of Charleston, SC; and Chief Traffic Engineer and Manager of Traffic Operations City of Charlotte, NC. In addition, he was in the private practice of transportation engineering in Atlanta, Georgia for several years and has served as an expert witness in traffic operation court cases. He also served as guest lecturer on municipal transportation management at Clemson University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of South Carolina. He was a Seminar Leader on Traffic Control Asset Management Programs for the Alabama, Florida and South Carolina Technology Transfer Programs.
He retired from Vulcan, Inc. in Foley, AL in 2005 as a vice president and manager of the Vulcan Technology Center, and still serves on Vulcan’s Board of Directors.
Harold’s background spanned Traffic Engineering and Management Systems design and implementation. His experience included extensive development of Computerized Information and Control Systems with published and presented papers on the topics. He authored or co-authored in excess of 100 transportation articles/studies and received a number of outstanding technical paper awards from the Southern District Institute of Transportation Engineers.
In April 1972 he was presented with a Public Safety Award from the International Municipal Signal Association for the design and successful implementation of the first Computerized Area-Wide Traffic Control and Surveillance System in the United States. This first closed-loop traffic management system was installed in Charleston in 1970 and was the first attempt to apply Mr. Barnes Green Wave technique to an entire street network grid. On October 21, 1980 he was issued U.S. Patent Number 4229726 as a co-inventor of the first microprocessor based Portable Electronic Traffic Event Recorder.
Harold served on a number of Technical Committees of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Southern District Institute of Transportation Engineers (SDITE). He is a Past President of the Alabama Section and the Southern District of ITE. As President of the Southern Section ITE 1971-72 he was responsible for the creation and implementation of the organization’s Annual Awards Program. He received SDITE’s highest professional service award the Herman J. Hoose Distinguished Service Award in April 1979. In June of 1993 he was designated 1992 Alabama Transportation Engineer of the Year by the Alabama Section of ITE. He is a Fellow-Life Member of ITE and Member of the Southern District ITE, Alabama Section ITE and former Member of the Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina Sections of ITE. In addition, he is a Member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers Expert Witness Council.