List of Contributions

I'm retired after a 48 year career in engineering. I have been primarily engaged in heavy construction field supervision, but also for brief periods in facilities design, highway traffic control, and planning. The engineers that you have described are confined to a rather narrow area of practice. In ...

Replacing previously constructed facilities is killing us; and no, Highway Departments do not have plenty of money to replace existing facilities. Their capital programs are usually backed up by years due to scarcity of capital. Rebuilding the same thing repeatedly, using the same standards and criteria, ...

Gordon, Over designed or over designed? The key operative in your comment is the design of the life cycle. Facility design entails capacity and physical durability. Highways designed for larger capacity can indeed be over designed. But this effect can be minimized and even negated by designing increased ...

Sir Isaac Newton said it best: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Virtually all modern engineering is rooted in the history of failure and the reaction to correct it and avoid more of it in the future! The wind failure of the Tay Railroad bridge 150 years ago during ...

The prevalent plethora of existing poorly maintainable structures and roadways constructed in the past seven decades may be attributed to an inadvertent bifurcation of the engineering (and to some extent) the architectural professions into field practitioners who physically produce the structure and ...