ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

This is the bit I really don’t get. I understand someone thinking that cars are the best and we need to cater to people who want to drive them; but I don’t understand a so-called “engineer” who deliberately overbuilds things at massive expense, thus incurring further increased maintenance expenses. I mean the first person is wrong, but the second person just makes no sense at all.

Because those engineers were taught that such road s were *not* over engineered. They were taught that it was *necessary* to be that big and that wide and that straight for roads to be safe, and all across North America the standards to which they must adhere to were written in that same era even though anybody with an ounce of keeping current knows how much stuff like that has been shown to do the opposite of keep things safe. 

Even if an civil engineer is young enough to have been taught the new data, they still have to adhere to those standards or what they design will just get thrown in the trash. Also, plenty of them are just unimaginative pencil pushers who just accept what the manuals say without questioning why they haven't been updated with the new data, which is kinda odd because engineering is supposed to be a culture of continuous learning for your entire career, why you need to under go regular testing to keep your certifications "current".

I think two things are being conflated here...over-engineered roads are different from overbuilt roads as we are discussing here.

Roads that are too wide, with too large corner radii are "over-engineered". Roads that are overbuilt have too many lanes for the traffic they carry. Like Westmount Rd. is extremely narrow...it is definitely not "over-engineered" but it is over built because it has four lanes.

Most of our roads are both however, and both cause problems and wasteful spending.

But your argument is true for road engineering--the standards the region sets are excessive.

But the choice to build four lane roads where they are not necessary is a policy choice...not an engineering choice--there are no standards requiring Highland Rd. to be four lanes. Engineers do have guides and standards that they use to try justify these decisions it is even more vague and handwavey than road standards, and if council directed them to, no engineer would put up an engineering fuss about building narrower roads like they do about deviating from "engineering standards".

Even more however, even by the standards the engineers use for roads the road we are discussing are actually still over built. Even by the most aggressive traffic modelling Highland Rd. does not justify four lanes. The choice to build four lanes is a policy choice from engineers who like building four lane roads.