Below is a report of the 2nd Day of the National APWA Conference: General Session: Becoming a Community Builder – Leadership in Changing Times Day two of the 2011 APWA conference started with a general session, Becoming a Community Builder – Leadership in Changing Times, with keynote speaker, Ian Hill. He began by sharing…
Category: Transportation
Opening Day at 2011 APWA Congress & Exposition
This year's International Public Works Conference & Exposition is being held in Denver, Colorado. The event opened yesterday morning with a welcome by the outgoing president, George Crombie, and a transfer of leadership to the new president, Diane M. Linderman. First General Session – Michael Hayden The first general session followed with keynote speaker, Michael Hayden,…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 32 and 33
Day 32 & 33 I decided to combine yesterday's post with today's because wow – have I been busy! On Thursday I tried to finalize a few outstanding items before taking off a few days to attend conferences. I finalized a cost estimate for resurfacing a major roadway in the city. Then sent out the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 31
Day 31 Seminar/Workshop Today I attended a workshop on Adaptive Signal Control – one of the technology innovations in the Every Day Counts initiative. The class was given by FHWA, and the city of Bolingbrook hosted the site. There were only about 20 people there: 3 from municipalities, 2 consultants, 4 from counties and personnel…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 30
Day 30 Jury Duty Not sure if anyone realized I never uploaded an article yesterday, but I didn't post because I was called for jury duty. So I had to take the day off to go to that. It was interesting – I got as far as being questioned as a possible juror, but the…
BRT, PRT, and Human Behavior
I've blogged for some time about the benefits of a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system because I believe there really are few other solutions that truly offer a comparable solution to the car. Unfortunately moving over to this type of system would take considerable time and funding so I'm not sure I'll see it in…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 28
Day 28 Utility in our Right of Way with No Permit Today I spent a little more time looking into the utility that was placed in our right of way with no permit. We went out into the field to measure how far off the road the concrete handholes were poured. For most of the…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 27
Day 27 Road Project Now that our road project is substantially complete, we've been working on getting out a pay estimate. The project engineer prepared the estimate late last week and gave it to me yesterday. So this morning, I spent some time checking over the final quantities and comparing them to the original quantities…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 26
Day 26 Coding payouts I started the day going through some emails. Then the other engineers and I went over some recent pay requests and the budget line items to make sure we were coding everything correctly. We wanted to do this because our finance department has gone though and organized our funds into a…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 25
Day 25 Water Main Extension Most of the first half of my morning was spent working on a cost estimate for the water main extension I have designed. I also filled out all the IEPA permits for the project and had our water superintendent sign them. Then I filled out the EcoCat to determine…