Stopping traffic.

Moses R. Wilson spends a lot time on the highway counting cars, trucks and buses. M He can tell you how many vehicles travel along a road at a particular time of day or he can project how many cars will travel along that same road 10 years from now.

No, Wilson is not a full-time hitchhiker with nothing but time on his hands. He is the owner of Wiltec, a Pasadena, Calif.-based traffic data research company. Now, what does a traffic data research company do? Simply put, it conducts traffic surveys. Traffic engineering deals with day-to-day traffic problems such as congestion," explains the 31-year-old Wilson. "We also develop future transportation strategies."

For example, in 1988 Donahue-Schriber, a Newport Beach, Calif.-based developer of shopping malls, asked Wilson, who was in the process of launching Wiltec, to do a traffic study before it built the Tustin Market Place in Tustin, Calif. "We did the actual traffic count and projections for the development and told them where to build or expand roads and where to build parking lots," Wilson recalls.

Wilson a former associate engineer for a traffic engineering and planning firm, started Wiltec in January 1989 out of his apartment with one contract in hand. Three months later, he used $10,000 in savings to lease a small office and buy a computer, a copy machine, a van and supplies. Today, Wilson runs Wiltec with his two brothers and his sister and brother-in-law.

Most of Wiltec's clients are private civil engineers, transportation planners and traffic engineering companies. Last year the 3-year-old firm conducted 494,000 worth of traffic studies. This year's revenues are expected to exceed $650,000.