Driverless vehicles – It’s Only a Matter of Time

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Pam Broviak

This month, Google received Patent No. 8078349 for "Transitioning a Mixed-Mode Vehicle to Autonomous Mode." The vehicle appears to be able to function in a driver-controlled mode, yet has the ability to be placed in a "driver-less" mode. When placed in this mode, the vehicle will use non-human inputs to monitor its location and proceed along a predefined path. When Google first applied for this patent, I saw some stories that did not seem to take this device seriously. I suppose it could be that as a society, we are so entrenched with the status quo when it comes to transportation that we cannot imagine anything other than what we have today. But for me, this is just one more sign that we are on our way to replacing cars with another type of transportation that does not require constant input and control by a human.

The key with the Google car is that it not only provides the promise of totally autonomous vehicles, but also the transition needed to get there. When I describe to people the thought of a personal rapid transit system run with either public or private cars, one of the questions has been how to transition to that system. And after seeing the Google car, it does seem to be a good solution. As infrastructure for autonomous vehicles is built out, we will need the ability to switch between modes in a manner similar to that used by the Google car.

And speaking of infrastructure, the other question or concern I hear, particularly from those in my field of civil engineering, is what will be used as a surface for these type of vehicles? I like to think it would not be pavement because I am not sure pavement as we have today is sustainable. Every year we spend an enormous amount of money and natural resources in just maintaining our roadways. And look at the difficulty Congress is having passing a highway bill. Not only can they not agree on what to fund and how much, but one of our main sources of revenue for highways, the gas tax, appears to no longer be viable or sustainable.

Add this in with the feedback we are hearing from the general public,

No more new roads
Reduce congestion and increase efficiencies
Reluctance to use public transit
More bike and pedestrian friendly roadways
Ever-present concern over drunk driving and now texting/talking while driving
Concern over waste generated from construction

and, if you deal with these restrictions every day, eventually you might start wondering just how long cars have left. Then if you begin to imagine how it could be with autonomous vehicles, PRTs, Google cars, or whatever you want to call them, you wonder why we are not at least talking about it. No one would ever have to worry about drinking/texting/talking and driving, and if you elevate the cars, you gain a tremendous amount of green space, save resources for other purposes, and don't have to worry about waste disposal from construction. People in the future will wonder how we could have used such a primitive system.

Yet, I don't hear these discussions from others in my field, and I worry that it will be another innovation that passes us by. If we don't at least monitor, understand, plan, think about our role in this transition, and work to become part of it, we will be left on the sidelines while a company like Google takes the lead on infrastructure design.

Water Main Break Clock

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Pam Broviak

The Uni-Bell PVC Pipe Association has set up a Watermain Break Clock site showing real time numbers and costs of water main breaks. According to the information posted, there are 850 water main breaks that occur each day in North America. A quick search on Twitter gives us a snapshot of just a few of these: http://twitter.com/#!/search/water%20main%20break. (I've also added a widget on the side showing a stream of tweets talking about water main breaks.)

In the last city where I worked, ductile iron or cast iron pipes were used for main construction up until about 1990. It was about that year that we started putting in PVC for new mains or for replacements. In the 20 years I worked in that area, all of our breaks were on the metal pipe, and we probably averaged 10 to 20 breaks a year.

Of course, the PVC mains were new – by the time I left that job, the oldest PVC main we had was about 20 years old. So did the PVC perform better because of the material or age? Where I work now, they have been using ductile iron exclusively for main construction so obviously all of our breaks are on metal pipes – I think we have about 20 to 40 a year.

But over the last few months I have been working on a water main extension project to install about 1300 feet of new main. We priced out the pipe the other day and compared the PVC costs with the ductile iron costs – PVC was cheaper by half. With the economy the way it is, I believe we will be buying the PVC pipe, and based on the data on this site, it looks like we'll be preventing some future main breaks.

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 73

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Pam Broviak

Day 73 or How to Save Our Transportation Funding

Plan Review

I spent part of the day reviewing the plans for a bike underpass that the county is planning to build. The county received a grant to construct the improvement. It's definitely needed! The underpass will allow pedestrians and bicyclists to safely cross one of the busiest arterials in the county.

Water Main Easements

I was going to send the easement plats to our city attorney today so he could prepare the documents, but after checking them one more time, I noticed one of the angles was wrong on the plat. So I emailed the consultant to have them revise the plat.

GIS Features

Our GIS group has also been planning to set up our sidewalk feature class. We decided to go with a centerline to designate this feature and assign as main attributes the material, width, year of repair, and road. We are also creating a curb ramp feature class that will be a point feature with attributes such as detectable warnings, slope, etc.

PACE Bid Tab

I did receive a copy of the PACE Bid Tab in the mail today even though I had requested a pdf of it be sent through email. Well, at least I got it. I put up an image of it at the bottom of this post so you can see the bidders and the amounts. (You have to click the image to get a good look.) It is strange because it doesn't look like a normal bid tab for a construction project – it is more of a summary of bids. And I am not sure how the highest bidder became the lowest bidder because from what I learned at the precon, Landmark was awarded the project. As you can see from the bid tab, they seem to have had the highest total bid. Then over on the right, someone put the lowest bid amount from Dimensions in Concrete in the line where Landmark is and labeled it lowest bid. I tried to go on the FTA website to see if they somehow have a creative way to allow a public agency to transform the highest bidder to the lowest bidder, but could not find anything. So the other explanation could be that the FTA allows public agencies to award projects to the highest bidder. Also, it seems strange that none of the main concrete companies in the area that bid our concrete work, other than Landmark, submitted bids.

Aside from all that, the good news is that PACE is at least re-bidding the portion of this $4+ million job that lies within our county. So hopefully when they rebid, the highest bidder comes in lower because it appears that for this project, the highest bidder is actually the lowest bidder or at least gets the job! I realize this is a crazy idea, but maybe next time they could award to the lowest bidder, and we'd have a few more transportation dollars to spend. Or maybe I, along with the other engineers who looked at this, are just missing something. If anyone out there knows how this works, please send in a comment.

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 72

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Pam Broviak

Day 72

Government Day

In the morning, several of us participated in the city's government day. For this event, we invite students from the high school to spend the day with us learning more about what we do. We all met at city hall to pick up the students assigned to us and then headed out to take them on a tour of public works facilities. First we went to the wastewater plant where our operator told them about the treatment process. Then we all went to the water plant to see how we treat the drinking water. We also stopped at our public works offices and garage to show them the equipment and check out the GIS department. And finally we toured our generation facility where we have five large engines that run on natural gas and generate up to 30 MW of power. After the tour, we met up with other staff and students from city hall to eat lunch.

Miscellaneous (& still no response from PACE on the bid tab!)

The rest of the day was spent handling a lot of small, miscellaneous issues. Our concrete contractor was in town pouring the last of the sidewalks that were removed to correct trip hazards. I also contacted IDOT to find out some answers to questions about material inspection for a past job. Our consultant putting together the easements for the water main extension revised the incorrect plat and got it back to us. And I tried to call PACE one last time to check on where my bid tab is for that job – they still have not gotten it to me, and I believe they have gone past the legal date for doing so. Rather than immediately contact the attorney general's office, I thought I would call one last time to see why they have not sent me the bid tab. But no one answered the phone so I had to leave a message. If I don't hear from them soon, I will unfortunately have to contact the state to notify them they are delinquent on filling my FOIA request. I just don't understand what the big deal is about releasing a simple bid tab for a project worth over a million dollars.

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 71

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Pam Broviak

Day 71

Culvert Lining Project

Today the project engineer for our culvert lining project told me that the pipe joint had opened up in our culvert lining project. We had the pipe manufacturer, Snap-Tite, visit the site to look it over and offer a solution. But after seeing how it failed, I would not recommend in the future trying this type of pipe for this application. It's really unfortunate because up to this point the project had been turning out so well. Hopefully the manufacturer can come up with a method of making sure this does not degrade any further from what it has already done. I've included a photo we took to show how the joint moved open on the top and bottom. And I included a the name and manufacturer in this post so anyone considering using this method in the future is aware of the issues that can come up if they choose this method of installation. I can't say at this time what caused the joint to open so I am not sure if it is a construction problem or a manufacturer problem. But for me, it would not be worth taking a chance that this could happen again by specifying this method in the future unless we end up with an acceptable resolution.

Water Main Extension

We also met with the consultant who had prepared the incorrect easement for our water main project. Before meeting, I went out to the site to check their work. They definitely had missed the fact that the property owner had purchased part of a railroad right of way. So they took the 90-foot long easement we required and just moved it west. And instead of starting at what is actually the easterly property line and going west 90 feet, they started at the original property line and went west. This would have put the easement into the building. We also noticed during our meeting they had misspelled the word "Easement." Fortunately the consultant said he would check everything their subconsultant had done and fix it so it is right at no extra cost.

Email Issues

Last week our IT person notified a few of us we were using too much memory on the server for our emails. Of course I had the most because when I started working here, I asked if we had a limit and was told no. So I rarely deleted anything so I could easily find information. But this problem crashed our email server so now I have to bring the amount of storage I use to under 4Gb. So far I am down to 10 from 17 and have 6 to go! Seems like going to Google would be a good idea if we are operating this close to the limit! I can get almost 8 Gb of storage for free from them and 25 Gb for only about $50 a year! And lately it seems like everyone I talk to lately is moving their business or agency over to the Google Enterprise tools.

Development Meeting

We also had our development staff meeting. Today we discussed a few of the projects that we have been reviewing. For both, we have sent comments back to the developers and are waiting for responsed. We also discussed some sign regulation issues along with the expansion of our commuter parking deck and construction of the community gardens.

A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 70

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Pam Broviak

Day 70

GIS Group Meeting

Today started out amazing then in the afternoon went to total frustration. I had to leave very early this morning to meet a co-worker for a GIS meeting of IMAUG – Illinois Municipal Arc Users Group. If you are into GIS, this is a great group to get involved with. Today's meeting was in Vernon Hills so pretty far away from Geneva where we work. But it was well worth going to. I was scheduled to speak first thing about QR Codes. Not sure it was a subject many were interested in, but hopefully I was able to offer some insight into their use in our industry. Below this post is the presentation I gave.

The other presentations were much more amazing! Will Rockwell from the village of Vernon Hills explained to us how to use Google Fusion tables and maps to make incredible GIS maps. Wow – they turned out great looking with very little work. Here is a link to more information from Google about using this tool: http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/

We also heard from a few other speakers who talked about applications for checking properties with liens, ESRI certifications, and a county web map service.

Parking Lot Project

After lunch and after we returned, I went with a couple other engineers to meet with a few people to discuss the design of the alley that will connect our proposed parking lot with one of the main streets through our downtown. This was a good meeting, and we look forward to getting a landscape design from the person we met with.

Water Main Project

My primary frustration hit when one of the engineers gave me a copy of the easement plats we had arranged to have prepared for our water main project. We had purposely hired a local firm to provide the surveying services because they have always produced such good work for us in the past. Imagine my surprise when the engineer gave me the plat and said, "we have a problem – they left off part of the property." Sure enough they had missed the fact that the property owner had acquired additional property over which our easement should have run. And as the engineer pointed out, the surveyor had actually shifted our easement over from where we had shown it to be because of missing this additional parcel. Well, when I looked at who prepared the plat, it was not the firm we had hired but another that we had specifically chosen not to use exactly because of problems like this. So I called the firm we had hired to ask why they hired another firm to do the work we hired them to do. All they said was sometimes they do that. No apology – no "I guess we should have asked if we could sub out the work." Nothing. I am not even quite sure how to respond at this time because I have never even heard of a firm doing such a thing. We are supposed to meet on Monday to discuss where to go from here.

QR Codes for CAD/GIS Professionals

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