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

Shouldn't the bureaucracies be penalized, instead of the poor engineers?

The engineers built the 90-degree layout specified by their clients!

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a paper trail documenting the engineers' objections, signed and notarized by the clients.

It's hard for me to judge the engineers without knowing more.

Sometimes we are paid to say “no”.

Depends entirely on the culture. Some cultures saying “no” is simply not what you do.

More often we are paid to say “yes”

It depends on what you expect from your engineers and how hierarchy works. It is a cultural thing I guess.

Do you expect engineers to do what you ask them to do, no matter how stupid. If you do and your engineers execute your stupid orders, then you are at fault. It was your job to have common sense, ask the right people, etc... You failed.

Now you may expect your engineers to call you and your stupid plans out, and if they didn't, it is their fault. They should have called you out and they didn't. They failed.

In the west, we usually expect the latter, so engineers should certainly be penalized. In India, I don't know.

No. I'm a licensed civil engineer in the US. The license comes with an explicit duty to the public, to uphold public safety. I am in responsible charge of the work I produce and personally liable for the safety of that work, in perpetuity, and it SHOULD be that way. Any plans that I produce are subject to that standard.

India has a similar system for public works projects where a licensed engineer MUST supervise the work.

Frankly, sometimes I think the software world would be a lot better off with a similar system.

It might have been a bit of wishful thinking.

Put it this way: sometimes a licensed engineer, who can lose the license for shoddy engineering, is paid to say “no”. Say “yes”, lose your license, no longer get paid.

While there is no licensing in our industry, we can (should?) have our personal standards play a similar role.

the article says:

> the final result “is neither fulfilling the functional requirement nor safe for road users.”

Customers can say all sorts of crazy things, they havo no knowledge of what's a good design or not. It's up to engineers to ensure design is safe. If an engineer knowigly signs-off on the design that is not safe, they deserve all the punishment.

That's the role of a professional standards organization: to protect the public.

If that doesn't exist, you don't have protection for yourself, you only have your own ethics. It's more important, and also more dangerous.

This doesn't look unsafe though, just inconvenient.

Both in the US[1] and UK[2] you can find bridges with actual 90-degree angles. The one in India[3] is more like 75 degrees.

[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/3CBqVHbVEtonHjcr9 [2]https://maps.app.goo.gl/8cVB44VDJRPadY6s6 [3]https://maps.app.goo.gl/ikPSmLEGYwVJLqDz7

Lmao that quayside bike lane is diabolical. Suicidal.

The second link is in Canada.

The first one looks much safer on streetview, the road bends at 90 degrees but the lanes are curved with plenty of room between the edges and barriers on the edges too. The bridge here looks like a one laner with barely enough room to turn and barriers small enough that you could fly off the bridge.

I am curious, how did you find those?

I like to think that it's (posh accent) "Yes good sir, I do indeed keep an extensive collections of references to exotic bridge layouts"

What would be neatest is to learn that there is an exotic geospatual query language. "no junction and road bend radius less than 20M within 50 meters of bridge"

But I suspect it is a well formulated web search "Complaints about right angle overpass"

And final thoughts, Your right, it is not much different than a common freeway offramp system. So I am not sure what the fuss is about. Perhaps too constrained, and it needs a larger turning area?

"New Westminster, British Columbia" lol. It looked nothing like the UK but at least they didn't plump for Colombia!

Anyway, here is a real British one:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/VAdfguBXNcDB74Yu5

I don't think it's that uncommon especially when crossing rivers because roads typically run along the river bank. A lot of roads and field boundaries were set down 1000s of years ago.

The British way is that so long as you put up big 'ol black and white arrows then 90° is child's play, it could be a 180° hairpin. I don't drive much but I hated multi-story-car-park-spiral ramps that for four floors would be a 1560° turn at full lock in a small car. Feels like I am failing astronaut training as my stomach turns over.

This is another variant of the argument who should business corporations serve. On one side, you have the argument the client or stockholder is the only stakeholder. (An extreme example is the Sackler's Purdue Pharma peddling Oxycontin which delighted stockholders for a while). On the other side, you have the argument there are many stakeholders including customers, employees, and the community they live in. (An extreme example of this was Google who promised to do good for society and treat their developers as prized not commodities; now Google appears to swinging to the other direction.)

in the 90s i built a webinterface for a database of architectural details for a university department. i don't know if it included bridges, but i am sure that some university departments teaching bridge building or traffic planning somewhere have a database of bridge layouts. maybe this one here: https://urbannext.net/

Those are not the same at all.

Search for "swept path analysis" for just one component of what you're missing. (There are many other components of design of a curve like this to consider.)

A 90 degree change in direction is fine by itself provided there is sufficient radius for vehicles to make the turn at the design speed.

In this case, if its two lane you may not be so convinced of its safety when it's your loved one on a scooter who got hit by a bus which tracked over into the oncoming lane just to navigate the curve. Or if its a single lane, when they died on the ambulance which was stuck in traffic on the bridge because two vehicles are unable to pass and everyone behind them would need to backup in unison to sort out the resulting cluster.

But safety is only part of the duty to the public here. The bridge needs to function for its intended specification and if it fails to do so for basic engineering reasons, you absolutely have no business holding a license and signing off on public plans and indeed you would be disciplined or stripped of your license for something like this.

There's been a bridge there since the 13th century, and the current bridge is a listed structure built 1857. It's not really something you'd choose to build today.

An elegant solution to this problem would be to enforce a very low speed limit entering the turn.

“Sharp turn ahead, reduce speed to 5 km/h”

Even if the swept path issues were not an issue here, that method has been tried and tested, doesn't work, and is considered bad design practice in the field of traffic engineering.

There's a great deal of evidenced backed engineering practices and solutions to draw from to solve issues like this. Unlike software in noncritical applications, you can't just pull things out of a hat and hope it works. People die if you do that.

You can't just say "here's how fast you can drive this road." You have to design the features of a road to calm traffic. If you design a road like a freeway and then put up a 15mph speed limit sign, people aren't going to just drive 15mph. Thats just not how traffic and people work. If you want people to go slower you should design traffic calming features into the road.

Its generally bad to have inconsistent design speed for different features of a road. And by bad I mean people will get killed at disproportionate rates. It happens all the time anyway for various reasons but not very often.

That doesn’t sound like a good justification.

I took an extra year and a half in college to get an ABET-accredited EE/CS degree instead of the CS degree that wasn't, which is a prerequisite for the Professional Engineer exam.

The problem with all things engineering with systems and/or software is there are zillions of tools x several options x infinitely unique backgrounds, most of which are informal. There isn't nearly enough standardization, scant convention over configuration, and not nearly enough formal, rigorous (testing) methodology even where it's needed.

~20 years ago, I had multiple long talks with an applied systems prof about the constraints, barriers, and motivations on the professionalization of software/systems engineering.

Completely ignoring that the point of the bridge was to move a fuckton of traffic and saddling it with a restriction that makes it unfit for purpose if the users behave lawfully is not elegant. It is ignorant to the point of not being distinct from malice. It's like an adult version of one sibling being told don't touch the other and then they get in the others face while saying "I'm not touching you".

Most of the work of professional engineers consists of being paid to say what everyone already knows or affirm that the default option is fine but is forced by the law to pay you to say on their behalf record.

"the stormwater impacts of the proposed alterations to the site are negligible"

"the foundation will be constructed with 3500psi concrete"

And so on.

A huge fraction of the industry is a money fire at the public's expense. It's on the same order as all the "the hospital paid what for gloves?" type stuff that only the worse of the worst will defend.

That is my mistake, very sorry for that. Apparently that changed all the way back in 1867. Oops.

Agreed, the bridge is definitely not fit for that purpose. It's still not dangerous though unless you take spiking heart rates caused by bad traffic into account. ;)

I just remembered that I saw a Reddit thread with some users posting other examples of this so I just clicked on the most upvoted post for this bridge and filtered the comments to those linking to Google Maps.

So sadly there was no exotic geospatual query language involved - although that would have been a way cooler answer. :/