Today I tried out Street Bump – a mobile application designed and developed by Connected Bits, LLC and produced by the Mayor's office of Boston. This application, available for the iPhone, picks up bumps in the road as people drive along a street with their phone. Because smoothness or "the ride" is one component we…
Tag: roads
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…
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…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 24
Day 24 Safety Meeting Today was the first Thursday of the month and that means safety meeting day! The whole public works staff attends the monthly safety meeting, and the topic today was backhoe safety. If I get a chance I'll put up a post on it later this week because it was interesting and…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 23
Day 23 This morning we had our regular engineering staff meeting. It was a pretty typical meeting with GIS sharing what they were doing and then our engineers and technical staff letting us know the status of all the projects. After our meeting, we started driving the roads to determine their condition. We also spent…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 22
Day 22 Parking Lot Planning This morning a couple of us discussed the parking lot we are planning to build in our downtown. The project engineer for the job submitted the necessary documents to our planning department for the planning commission hearing we will have Sept. 8th. I also talked to a landscaper who will…
Selling off Assets: A Road to Failure?
Today I read an article on Reuters indicating voters are increasingly supportive of government leasing infrastructure assets. I cannot imagine how anyone who truly understands infrastructure and government can come away with a blanket statement supporting privatization of government assets. From reading the story, I can only think that these voters are making this decision…
Plot Your Potholes Here!
Ever since I found the FixMyStreet online reporting tool for England, I have been on the lookout for one to be developed for the U.S. And the other day, I finally found it at SeeClickFix. The site offers users the opportunity to plot their issues using Google Maps. Problems are designated by inputting an address,…