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CIVIL ENGINEERING IN GENERAL & TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING IN PARTICULAR
by Ataur Bacchus

I would not be surprised to find that ex-third-world people of a certain sophistication and age, such as ourselves, are ambivalent towards civil or transportation engineering. On the one hand our racial memories will link, if not attribute, imperialist pushes and plantation culture to the canals of the eighteenth century and the railways of the nineteenth, clear outcomes of an engineering take on the world. On the other hand, availability of better roads, covered sewers and affordable access to places of learning, also outcomes of that take, have helped us physically to escape and much later, mentally to transcend, brute plantation servitude. On the one hand, civil engineering works endow us all with empowering images of our species “directing the Great Sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of man. . . . “ in the words of the charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers, England, 1828. On the other hand these same works are seen, with apparent justification, as despoiling the planet. Those of us who migrated to North America in the sixties had our mutinous zones pleasured, and our resistance stiffened by such hard core iconoclastic literature as The Waste Makers (1960), Silent Spring (1962) and America the Raped – The Engineering Mentality and the Devastation of a Continent (1969). Nevertheless, on balancing all the considerations on one hand with all those on the other, some of us older engineers find common feeling, if not total harmony, with the boast of the US Navy Civil Engineering Seabees “Can do! The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

To adopt a different tack, and for readers who prefer a helping of facts to ruminations of engineers with philosophical pretensions, we might offer the following:

An estimated 200,000 jobs in Ontario are related to road transportation. Some 880 million tonnes of commodities, worth 2.7 billion dollars, move over Ontario roads daily. Transportation costs constitute 2.5 percent of the price of high value goods such as cars and 90 percent of low value goods such as landfill.

The functions of a civil/transportation engineer can usefully be lumped into four

categories, those she performs before construction of some facility (feasibility studies, site investigations, selection among alternative plans, design), those she performs during construction (management of consultant engineers and contractors) those she performs after construction (operational control and maintenance) and those that she performs at multiple points in the life of the facility (cost and effectiveness comparisons, safety audits, assessments of impacts on the environment, and research). Thus in the life of a new highway, the engineer may bore holes in the proposed roadbed to determine whether it can sustain heavily loaded trucks in future. She may choose a route that crosses fewer bodies of water – bridges are very expensive. In the management of contractors she will, by relatively simple calculations, identify which items if delayed will have the greatest impact on whether the job is finished on time. Once the road is built, depending on how complex it is, she may try to influence individual drivers, collectively known as traffic – the overhead signs one sees on Highway 401 across Toronto are an example of such attempts at influence. As the road ages, potholes may appear; filling them with durable materials constitute wise maintenance. At every stage research is an imperative; North America leads the world in striking research agendas to find answers to questions about new materials and procedures. More and more, statistical analysis is invoked as a helpful lens through which many rational processes are viewed, through which the apparent irrationality of others is reduced; its potential for clarification is more than that for distortion.

Is transportation engineering a good career choice for young people, as this is written in 1998? On the one hand we are not building as many roads, bridges and railways as we used to. For the majority of us who want to get into university, get a job-ticket, get out and cash in, you can do a lot better. For the crazed fringe who regard their mind, at any age, as a construction in progress, who believe or are open to beliefs, that spiritual, artistic and political freedom flourish best on a strong foundation of rationality – tell that to fundamentalist movements, political and religious, in the Third World - and that statistical analysis is a precious window that God gave us for joyously sensing the star-bursting, mama-be-praised undulations of this chancy universe of Hers, you can do a lot worse.