Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Ahmad Safi · WSP · September 2026
Here is the map Raylanderson promised. WSP's own site sets the boundaries for it: the transportation work is for federal, state and local government agencies, across highways and bridges, rail and transit, and aviation, with program and construction management as a line of its own. So this page takes the public owners who buy construction management and inspection, splits them into the groups that buy differently, and for each one shows who owns the decision and roughly how many exist. Because your work is based around Chicago, every counted row also gives Illinois and Indiana. It maps the market around WSP, not WSP. One group has no honest public count and the page says so rather than showing you a number. There is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Where the decision sits
Eight rows. Every number counts public bodies, not projects and not people, unless a row says otherwise. These rows deliberately overlap, because one city can own an airport, run a bus system and maintain its own bridges all at once. They are groups of buying behavior, not a sum, and they should never be added together.
State departments of transportation
The anchor of the market and the row everyone already works. The large lettings, the long corridor programs and the multi-year construction engineering contracts all start here, and the selection cycle is published, so the timing of the work is public knowledge. The split that matters inside the row is not the department but the district, because the district carries the program and the people who remember how the last job went.
Who decides: the district or region construction engineer who carries the program, with a central consultant selection unit running the scoring.
Who blocks it: prequalification. In most states, Illinois and Indiana among them, a firm that is not prequalified in the category does not reach the shortlist, however good the proposal.
52 departments
one in every state, plus DC and Puerto Rico. Illinois and Indiana: one each. Together they own about 291,000 of the country's roughly 624,000 highway bridges.
Toll authorities and toll concessions
A small row that behaves like a state department with its own revenue. Toll owners fund capital work from their own collections, plan it years ahead and keep engineering support on long standing arrangements, so the relationship lasts longer than any single contract. The row mixes three different kinds of owner: state authorities, local authorities and private concessions running a public road under a lease, and each one buys through a different door.
Who decides: the chief engineer and the engineering and construction leadership under them, with a board that approves the contract.
About 150
named toll operators behind 489 toll facility records in 37 states and Puerto Rico. Operator names are not standardized in the records, so this is a cleaned band, not an exact list. Illinois: a state authority and a private concession on the road side, plus two small toll bridges on the state line. Indiana: a state owned toll road run under concession, a privately built toll bridge, the Louisville bridges over the Ohio tolled by a joint board with Kentucky, and one small bridge shared with Illinois.
County governments
The row with the most structures per decision maker. A county owns and maintains a large bridge and road network with a small engineering office, and it lets work every season rather than once a decade. In Indiana this row matters more than in any neighboring state: the counties own about two in every three bridges in the state.
Who decides: the county engineer or highway superintendent, with the county board approving the contract.
About 3,000
county governments nationally. Illinois 102, Indiana 91 (the state has 92 counties, and the census counts Marion County as part of Indianapolis). Counties own about 226,000 of the country's highway bridges.
Cities, villages and townships
The widest row and the most uneven one. A city of 100,000 runs a public works department that buys like a small state agency; a village of 900 may have no engineer on staff at all. The useful cut is population, and the useful surprise is in Illinois, where township road districts own more bridges than the state department does. That is a lot of infrastructure sitting with some of the smallest public bodies in the country.
Who decides: the city engineer or public works director in a city. In an Illinois township, the elected highway commissioner of the road district.
About 19,500
municipal governments, about 3,150 of them with 10,000 or more people, plus about 16,200 township governments. Illinois: 1,295 municipal (224 over 10,000) and 1,425 townships. Indiana: 567 municipal (82 over 10,000) and 1,004 townships.
Transit agencies
Most transit agencies run buses and little else, so the real buyers of construction management are the few with fixed assets: rail track, stations, yards and structures of their own. That subset is small enough to name, and each one carries a capital program that runs for years. On a federally funded project the selection runs the same qualifications first process as a highway job.
Who decides: the chief engineer or the capital program lead, with the agency board approving.
About 2,900
agencies report to the federal transit database; about 520 are larger urban systems filing full reports and 80 report rail track in their federal inventory. Illinois: 101 reporting, 15 full, 2 with rail track. Indiana: 73 reporting, 14 full, 1 with rail track.
Airport owners
A neighbor of the highway rows with a different calendar. Airfield and terminal work is phased around live operations, which makes oversight heavier and the owner more careful about who it lets on the airside. Almost every airport in the national plan is publicly owned, by a state, a city, a county or an authority, so this row overlaps the government rows above it.
Who decides: the airport's director of engineering or of planning and development, with the owning state, city, county or authority approving.
About 3,300
airports in the national airport plan, 390 of them primary commercial airports. These count airports, not owners, and one owner can hold several. Illinois: 83 (11 primary). Indiana: 65 (4 primary).
Design-build contractors
The other side of the table. On design-build work the contractor, not the agency, hires the designer, and in some states the independent quality team as well, so the buying decision moves to the pursuit team months before the owner's shortlist. This is a narrower conversation than the owner rows and should be weighted that way.
Who decides: the design-build pursuit lead or preconstruction director, who assembles the team before the proposal is due.
About 9,300
highway, street and bridge construction employer sites, not companies, so a contractor with several yards counts several times. Illinois 359, Indiana 158. Nothing in the count says which of them pursue design-build, so treat it as an outer limit.
Private owners building public roads
Developers paying for an interchange or an access road under a permit, logistics and industrial campuses, and railroads rebuilding the crossings and bridges they own. All of them buy oversight and inspection, and all of them answer to a public agency's standards while doing it. The problem is that no public register enumerates them: a developer funding a road improvement appears on no list as a buyer until the permit is filed. Any number you are shown for this segment by anyone has been estimated, not counted.
Who decides: the owner's development or project director, often with the agency's permit engineer shaping what the oversight has to cover.
No honest public count
This row is built by hand from permit and project signals, not bought. It is named here because leaving it out would make the map look more complete than it is.
Who owns the bridges in your two states
One inventory, split by the owner of record. Each bridge has exactly one owner, so unlike the rows above, these columns do add up to their totals. The national column covers every state, DC and the territories.
OwnerIllinoisIndianaUnited States
State department7,8865,792290,912
County4,15112,656226,268
Township12,1542031,025
City or village2,04559549,932
State toll authority5103327,858
All other owners18114718,198
Total26,92719,542624,193

Where the openings are

1
In Illinois the largest bridge owner by count is not the state. Township road districts hold 12,154 of the state's 26,927 bridges, against 7,886 for the state department. In Indiana the counties hold 12,656 of 19,542, about two in three. In both states local owners hold most of the structures, and those owners are small public bodies, not engineering organizations. The big lettings sit with the state and the tollway. The recurring volume, one bridge and one resurfacing at a time, sits here.
2
Construction management on federally funded work is bought on qualifications first. That rule runs across highways, transit and airports alike, which makes this a market where the record a firm has built with an owner counts heavily, and most of that record exists before the notice is advertised. Every public owner on this page is on a public list, so finding them is not the work. The work is being known to the people who run the selection, in enough of these offices that your name is already familiar when the shortlist is drawn.
3
The capital heavy rows next door are short enough to know by name. Nationally, 80 transit agencies report rail track in their federal inventory and 390 airports are primary commercial airports, and each of them runs a capital program for years at a time. In Illinois and Indiana together that is three rail operators and fifteen primary airports. That is not a market to prospect, it is a list to hold, with a named owner of the decision at every one.
Built from the federal census of local governments (2022 tables), the federal bridge inventory (2025 owner tables), the federal transit reporting database (2024 agencies), the national airport plan (2025 to 2029), federal toll facility records (2023) and the federal count of business establishments (2023), all pulled on 22 September 2026. The count of 52 departments is the membership of the state departments' own national association. Counts are public bodies unless a row says sites or airports. Rows overlap by design and must not be added together. Large counts are banded deliberately. A register proves that an owner exists, never that it has work in the field this year, and a segment with no credible public number says so here rather than showing one.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
enquirerconsulting.com