Seven Engineers Suspended After $2.3M Bridge Includes 90-Degree Turn

I'm sympathetic, in that I can easily see a situation where they were given constraints that kind of forced this. Still more than a little eye opening to see it actually built.

One of the design goals (a constraint if you will) was to pass 300,000 people a day. You gotta move fast for that, and there's no way to take that turn at any kind of speed. So it fails at its primary purpose.

BTW It's not uncommon these days that enshitification causes products to fail at their primary function. See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection. There have been several others, but I don't remember them. It's sad when a mechanical mercury switch has better up-time than fancy tech.

Yeah, I suspected this likely did not hold up to volume constraints. It may have been the highest volume they could hit with all of the other constraints?

Put differently, give engineering an unsolvable constraint set, expect engineering to drop some constraints. That is a management problem, not an engineering one, necessarily. (Granted, I'm assuming they didn't silently drop said constraints...)

It also looks narrow enough that even moderately sized cars would have trouble making that turn in both directions at the same time. Maybe it's an illusion due to the angles though.

The engineering problem here is how best to establish a paper trail.

Yeah whenever I see people complain about some engineering thing, from catastrophic failure to difficulty to fix, I generally can assume it was constraint based rather than malicious intent.

Some hotel collapses? Do you blame the engineer who was rushed because they needed to open to begin making payments on the debt? If the engineer refused, they would have found someone else.

Some part of a car is difficult to fix? They needed to get 35mpg + have enough trunk space to fit a stroller.

When I see these stories, there is always a finger to point, but I don't think these are black and white. There are customers, governments, and financial considerations at play.

Well you don’t need enshittification for that : in the early 2000s Sony released a digital music player that didn’t read mp3 but ATrac instead, and the provided converter was slow and buggy. Let’s say that consumers didn’t like it.

I’ve always wondered how they came to shoot themselves in the foot like that - any basic consumer or journalist test would have flagged that.

> See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection

Wait, what? I'd heard that they were deprecating the first gen Nest, but that it would still function as an offline programmable thermostat. Are you sure it won't be able to work in offline mode?

"pass 300,000 people a day" This strikes me as implausible because it implies 208 cars per minute, 24x7

The picture looks like a driveway, and my local interstate has 75K cars/day at 65 MPH and takes 4 lanes and they're pondering making it a 6 lane due to massive congestion due to economic and population growth in the area. I'm looking forward to saving a lot of time after they build the 6 lane.

I would theorize this is merely an on-ramp to a road network that overall passes 300K. It might be adequate for that if its just a few thousand cars per day.

I'm also impressed they can carry 300K people/day on a $2.3M bridge. Not unusual to blow half a billion per mile on a reconstruction project for a large wide interstate in the USA. $2M will get you roughly a small freeway overpass in the USA. The picture in the article looks more like an overpass or onramp than a mainline bridge. A new, long, wide, heavy weight limit mainline bridge over a large river can exceed a quarter billion in the USA. Its possible they're clickbaiting calling a mere onramp a "bridge" as if they're replicating the florida keys LOL.

Given that its India, I struggle to imagine any movement about 10mph

Traffic in India is a different beast. Your calculation assumes each person is in a separate car, but that is not common. Many people travel on motorcycles or mopeds, often with multiple people on each. Motorized 3-wheel rickshaws are common. There are buses, cars (often with multiple people per car), etc.

Do they have to survive the crossing as part of the specs?

It's practically never malicious intent from engineers, but that's not even the justification for prosecution. It's criminal incompetence.

Engineers are held to high standards of safety over their works. In Canada they can opt to swear an oath, similar to the Hyppocratic, that they recognize the moral weight of their career on other's wellbeing. In most developed countries there are specific licenses that imply added judgmental weight on their work; simply having an engineering degree isn't even enough to legally call oneself an "engineer" in some jurisdictions.

I'm not saying the bosses aren't equally guilty, but the footsoldiers who chose to carry out those "illegal" orders are, in this case, very specifically trained and warned to not do so.