onthecanposting

It's common practice here to take demolished concrete from a structure and pavement and use it as structural fill for new development. Sometimes on the same property. Some agencies will not allow contractors to haul it off as it has salvage value.

Concrete rubble is also salvageable on the job site. Recycling would require transporting to a mill, crushing, separating, transporting to a furnace, and then the process described in the article starts.

I think abrogating the property rights of every property owner in exchange for some people getting a shortcut is not a very good trade.

There are legal routes for public agencies to purchase portions of land to create routes for transportation, including pedestrian paths, that ensure you're at least paid for the lost property. If there is a need, then lobbying your mayor or council is the way to go about this. That's a lot less risky than letting anyone enter your property anytime for any reason as long as they say they're on a nature walk or something.

You are right! CAD users encode a design intent into the software, just like you encode a design intent into an editor. I model a construction outcome with geometry like you might model business rules with functions and objects.

Some of the wisdom from programming would do well to pass onto design software. Like how strong type systems can provide safety by pushing rules to compile time and make some errors unrepresentable. Meanwhile, I can fire up Microstation, draw roads crossing at the same elevation with no intersection (think stops and signals, not geometry) between them. Or a drain culvert could terminate in a big Hello Kitty picture. These things should be impossible. If the task is designing a road, I don't need the ability to draw anything I can possibly imagine. I really need the software to know what a road can and can't do, produce a model that obeys those constraints, and to give me files and documents I can give to an owner and a contractor which convey an accurate understanding of what that model is.

"The biggest reason this hasn't happened so far is the lack of a truly capable parametric kernel"

Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS?

The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow problem domains. SVG/DXF/DWG output is a plus, but I think a drawing software that works for high-volume machine parts, one-of-a-kind architecture, highways, 50-mile pipelines, circuits, urban transit plans, and art is the wrong direction. I use industry standard roadway design software and a "road" does not exist in the object model. Horizontal, vertical, and sectional components are all independently defined despite these things being inseparable and having some very obvious and well-specified rules about their interaction. I really think designers should spend more time thinking about outcomes and less time telling the computer how to display them.

They may just be renderings or heavy edits. I noticed a total lack of parking facilities for almost all buildings pictured. Highways are also pretty small for being next to what should be major traffic generators. There is also an absence of signalization at intersections where I would expect them. No auxiliary lanes or turn bays are marked on the pavement. Pavement markings are unblemished by tires. It doesn't make sense.

They're not real or nobody drives.

It might not be that bad. Auto workers produce more cars per employee, but some of the really repetitive activities are done by robots now. I think not having to do the same weld 8+hrs a day every day with consumers still getting their car is a net positive for owners, consumers, and labor.

Personally, I would love to deliver more projects. The vast majority of my time is spent on mind-numbing drudgery that makes the job extremely unsatisfying. If someone offered me a job where I got to focus on the fun parts of my work, and I didn't have to dump the drudgery on a poor intern (the AI does it), but at half my pay, I'd resign the same day.

The productive output of many people is also just mediocre. I think of chat AIs as near-zero cost interns or the boss's nephew. Probably doesn't know what it's talking about, but can get a lot done with supervision.

I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.

Some people manage projects that aren't software at all. Git has little utility for construction documents, and big construction design projects may involve interdisciplinary teams of dozens of people of widely varying cost and availability.

Buy a quality printer for their asking price and make your own molds. If it's fairly large, you may want to put the mold in sand for support, or cast in sections. Just remember to leave yourself pick points for lifting, and use dowels to join your segments. Embed a little steel, like a mesh, if any parts may be in tension or subject to bending.

You've discovered a market with unmet needs!

The CAPEX seemed a bit glossed over. $50ish billion isn't a small ask.

Perhaps I missed a zero somewhere, but 5MAF/yr would require pumping 6,900cfs of water to/from the gulf with 230+ft of head. We're going to need a bigger boat.

>I can't drink only beer.

Can't? Don't sell yourself short.

Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.

Sometimes offices are empty because banks that own them dictate the lease rates and building managers can't adjust price to fit the market rate. I sometimes think city councils and codes get too much heat on this issue and the 800lb finance gorilla in the room is politely ignored.

Yes. We don't use metric in the USA and you can't make us :)

100m at 1 lane is around 430SY. That's probably 2hrs of milling and an hour of tacking and paving, with maybe another hour or so for incidentals. So you may only get half a workday of production. For time consuming repairs, like full-depth replacement, the setup time cost may not be significant.

Keep in mind, though, you don't lose a lane of traffic. There is no need to truck in jersey barriers. You don't have to build an entire temporary detour road. You don't pay a consultant $200/hr to design a traffic control plan.

I think the real value is safety. The crew is shielded by the bridge and you have complete grade separation from traffic. That's a lot better than an orange barrel being the only thing between you and a minivan.

Honestly, this sounds like normal life being a junior employee at a big company. An ossified clique of old guard managers pick winners and losers with little regard for merit? Unbelievable bureaucratic overhead? Your boss expects you to flatter and fawn all over him because he allows you to work 50-60hrs a week at 80% the median salary without overtime pay? Sorry to say, this is just what they're all like. Do good work, make friends, and try to get a job at a small company where people treat each other decently and incompetents can't hide in the crowd.

If that bookkeeping overhead is fed into analysis and process mining to drive improvement, it might be a net gain. More often though, I see yet-another-spreadhseet applied as panacea, then it's forgotten in a few months and the process repeats over many years.

There is also the effect of decriminalization and depolicing which I did not see well addressed in the article. There are parts of the US where local government has the social leaning or at least their key donors have the social leaning to take a permissive attitude towards activity that was previously criminal. Effectively this makes activity like buying and selling drugs and shoplifting legal and, thereby, meaningless to report.

If anything the article may more likely be an indicator of the delta between crime as-is and as-reported or a cautionary tale of decision-driven-data

To your last point, Bentley software is standard for most DOTs for highway design. All their offerings are rife with quality issues to the point that I have never run their software without some spooky behavior requiring a reset or flushing the ProjectWise cache.

For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.

I wish I had listened to this a long time ago. That starting so niche nobody bothers you is a winning strategy would not have occurred to me. Thanks for sharing!

I don't think it's logistically or politically possible, but I really wish DWG, DXF and DGN would be replaced by SVG. That 2D drawings for the AEC industry are unusable by the majority of programs is absurd.

This is a lot like the Amazon strategy. At one point you probably had a few alternatives in mind for online shopping. Much less so now.

Microsoft will dust off it's previous merger plan from the last time this political football was punted and fill superfluousmanagement and "trust and safety" positions with old national security alumni. The surveillance will continue.

I've tried to research details about the size of BRI and find specific projects. It's surprisingly opaque if you're used to FHWA's public disclosure of funds and projects. You could trace most hihhway funding in, say West Virginia, by pulling a few documents. I couldn't find any details on any project. I could not even find a video stream of the last year's conference. Just a keynote translation a week later.

I am suspicious that BRI might be more hot air than substance. That or world journalism is oblivious to what is supposedly the largest international infrastructure program in the world. Or Google doesn't index it.

Would it be fair to say that civilian aviation is in a doom loop at this point? Margins get tight, quality falls, government increases cost of compliance, margins get tighter, quality falls, government saves the consumer again...?

This depends on location. Kids walk and bike where I live, but the streets are narrow and drained by open ditches, so there is more risk than streets with pedestrian access built in. Drivers are usually considerate of this and go slowly, though.

The short answer is pride and inertia.

The immediate cause is lower management can't be assed to learn anything, and nobody makes them. This is in part because at big firms after 5-10 years you can politic or job-hop into management and be an email engineer who does little outside of scheduling meetings and marking up PDFs. Young engineer training is usually informal and in master-apprentice fashion. Your mentor will show you how he or she learned it 10 years ago, which is how his or her mentor learned it 10 years before that.

There is little technological progress in civil engineering design that is not externally imposed, and the last big step forward was Excel and replacing hand drawings with CAD in the 90s. Digital delivery will be the next leap, but it's going to take lobbying, fanatical champions, and pure luck that Autodesk and Bentley don't use their billions to suppress it.

Procurement laws, client ignorance, and network effects shield engineering consultants from the discipline of the market. Wasteful practice is not punished. That and licensing regulations have created a sort of guild socialism that has allowed backwardness to survive.

I wish I had read this a year ago. I kept a mental note of pain points in the workflow, played it cool for four months, researched solutions to the problems, then when I got a shot as a task lead on a fresh project, I jettisoned the rituals and was way ahead of schedule while nobody was looking. Two months later the neurotic hall monitors found out. Oh no, sir. You don't just thumb your nose at practices that were pioneered in the 1990s just because they quintuple the cost of work. You will be made to do it our way to atone for your arrogance. You will use my ancient excel spreadsheet and tell me how much you like it.

Now the project is financially a total shit show, I'm besieged by dweebs, and I've been quietly looking for a new job for 6 months. Apparently, this was an avoidable situation.

Different people have different motive forces in their lives. Some people hate work and would be upset by losing their leisure time. Some people love the glory of challenging or prestigious projects and would welcome that situation.

A good manager knows the difference.

You are being helped. Given these requirements, it's pretty likely that your water utility will hike your rates to pay for the required upgrades. I feel badly for the rural utilities. This is likely to push the trend of regionalization.