After writing the other day about Google's car and the promise it holds for the future of our transportation, I was sent an awesome article written by Thomas Bamonte titled Information Becomes Infrastructure: Remaking the Highway Operating System in the Era of Smart Cars. Throughout the article, Bamonte, past general counsel for the Illinois State Toll…
Category: Civil Engineering
Driverless vehicles – It’s Only a Matter of Time
This month, Google received Patent No. 8078349 for "Transitioning a Mixed-Mode Vehicle to Autonomous Mode." The vehicle appears to be able to function in a driver-controlled mode, yet has the ability to be placed in a "driver-less" mode. When placed in this mode, the vehicle will use non-human inputs to monitor its location and proceed…
Water Main Break Clock
The Uni-Bell PVC Pipe Association has set up a Watermain Break Clock site showing real time numbers and costs of water main breaks. According to the information posted, there are 850 water main breaks that occur each day in North America. A quick search on Twitter gives us a snapshot of just a few of these: http://twitter.com/#!/search/water%20main%20break. (I've…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 73
Day 73 or How to Save Our Transportation Funding Plan Review I spent part of the day reviewing the plans for a bike underpass that the county is planning to build. The county received a grant to construct the improvement. It's definitely needed! The underpass will allow pedestrians and bicyclists to safely cross one of…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 72
Day 72 Government Day In the morning, several of us participated in the city's government day. For this event, we invite students from the high school to spend the day with us learning more about what we do. We all met at city hall to pick up the students assigned to us and then headed…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 71
Day 71 Culvert Lining Project Today the project engineer for our culvert lining project told me that the pipe joint had opened up in our culvert lining project. We had the pipe manufacturer, Snap-Tite, visit the site to look it over and offer a solution. But after seeing how it failed, I would not recommend in the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 70
Day 70 GIS Group Meeting Today started out amazing then in the afternoon went to total frustration. I had to leave very early this morning to meet a co-worker for a GIS meeting of IMAUG – Illinois Municipal Arc Users Group. If you are into GIS, this is a great group to get involved with….
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Days 68 & 69
Days 68 & 69 After spending most of the day yesterday in meetings, getting home late, then having to run out to attend a band concert, I decided just to wait until today and post both yesterday and today in one article. So here it is! Tuesday: IDOT audit of ARRA project IDOT was scheduled…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 67
Day 67 Culvert Lining Project I didn't have a chance to go out to the culvert lining project myself today because I had too many other meetings and things to do. But a couple of my staff went out to watch the contractor pour the headwalls. Our concern over this operation has been that the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 66
Day 66 Culvert Lining Project It looks like our issue with the culvert lining project has been resolved. We gave the structural drawings from our consultant to the contractor. Theh contractor ended up getting a couple prices from other concrete contractors which were lower than the original subcontractor's price. So it looks like we will…