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Notes -
Another year, another
karma farm<ins>post about civil engineering</ins>.The fifty-mile-long pavement-preservation project described in my previous post has been sent out for initial review. The one drafter in our office drew from as-builts and from satellite photographs the pieces of roadway that were not available in electronic format. Then the design (as far as pavement preservation even needs any "design") was split up between the five engineers in our office, yielding a workload of around ten miles per person. The end product was two hundred and fifty 24″×36″ sheets for fifty miles of roadway. (Again, this is just a brain-dead pavement-preservation project. Resurfacing projects have been known to exceed one thousand sheets for ten miles of roadway.) A good use of taxpayer dollars? I guess so.
Bureaucratic rigmarole:
I mentioned in my first post that, whenever the elevation of a roadway is increased by at least half an inch: The project must be reviewed by the Environmental people for flooding problems, and any location that would cause a flooding problem must be milled down before the new pavement-preservation treatment is applied, so that the overall increase in elevation is reduced to zero. Locations underneath overhead structures (whether bridges or signs) must also be milled down in this fashion.
I also mentioned that, if old electronic stuff like weigh-in-motion stations is present in the road, the electronics people may request that the electronic stuff be replaced as part of a pavement-preservation project.
New environmental rule: Any amount of elevation increase in or near a floodway (definition; red-and-blue striped areas on this page's maps) is forbidden. The half-inch exemption is not applicable in and near floodways.
New rule from FHWA (Federal Highway Administration): Any amount of milling in a project now triggers the requirements to construct new ADA-compliant curb ramps at intersections throughout the project. Previously, pavement-preservation projects were exempt from this requirement if the milling was limited. (I think the limit was something like ten percent of the project's total area, but no pavement-preservation project ever got anywhere near it.) That exemption has been eliminated. Also, weigh-in-motion stations can't be replaced in pavement-preservation projects under whatever exemption they previously were operating under.
The construction of new ADA-compliant curb ramps is out of scope for pavement-preservation projects.
Result: Goodbye, a quarter-mile-long piece of this pavement-preservation project that runs over a dam, plus a few other random spots adjacent to bridges! Goodbye, two random spots underneath overhead sign structures! Goodbye, three weigh-in-motion stations that the electronics people wanted to replace!
Bureaucratic failure:
In the first half of 2024, my office originally was supposed to be working on a project to replace an old traffic circle with a standard intersection. (The traffic engineers recommended a modern roundabout*, but the municipal government rejected that option.)
Whoops! The traffic-circle project was immediately adjacent to a bridge-replacement project. There was a minor conflict between the two proposed roadway edges, and a major conflict between two proposed drainage basins. (These conflicts weren't noticed previously because: the bridge spans a river between counties A and B, and the associated project was assigned to county A in the project-management system; the traffic circle is in county B, so the associated project was assigned to county B in the project-management system; and counties A and B are in two different project-management regions.)
The conceptual designer for the traffic-circle project and the final designer for the bridge project suggested adjusting the drainage basins and coordinating the roadway edges to eliminate the conflicts. But the Environmental people complained that doing a drainage (or hydrological or hydraulic—whatever) assessment of the same location twice would be a waste of their extremely limited resources. Since the bridge-replacement project was much further along in the design process, the traffic-circle project was merged into it, leaving my office to sit idle with no project assigned (other than the aforementioned fifty-mile pavement-preservation project, plus whatever random maintenance work orders came along) for six months.
What a wonderful use of taxpayer dollars!
*Reminder: A roundabout is a circular intersection with no traffic control except a yield sign at every entrance. Anything else is just a sparkling traffic circle**.
**Imagine being at intersections / so fat you look and see food
Reiteration:
God, what great writing
I used to write diatribes when I worked @ General Nutrition Centers
I work retail still so my passion for everything has waned
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