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…
Category: Transportation
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 – 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 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…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 65
Day 65 I really wanted to title this blog post: Today I Discovered Why We Have no Transportation Funds! The other day, I wrote about the BRT and Randall Road – the major corridor that runs through many of the communities in our area. In that post, I also mentioned the Route 529 study –…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 64
Day 64 Culvert Lining Project Today was somewhat of a continuation of the issues that started yesterday with our culvert project. Tomorrow I am meeting with the contractor and giving him the detailed structural design that we received today from our consultant. The contractor will have to determine if the work shown was what he…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 63
Day 63 – Happy Halloween! Culvert Lining Project Today I spent the day mostly troubleshooting some problems. The concrete subcontractor for the culvert project was on site. From what I was told by the project engineer, there seemed to be some confusion over what was to be done for the concrete headwall replacement. In a…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 62
Day 62 Bus Rapid Transit Today a few of our staff attended a meeting at Sherman Hospital in Elgin. The county arranged for the meeting to discuss bus rapid transit (BRT) along the Randall road corridor. It was a well attended discussion that lasted for most of the morning. A representative began the presentations by…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 61
Day 61 Balancing Budget Line Items I finally completed the analysis of my budget and identified two line items that needed to have funds amended to agree with the actual expenditures. Fortunately there were amounts in related funds that I could amend to a lower amount so the overall change to my division's budget is…