Washington and Oregon place equity at the heart of I-5 bridge replacement

https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering-source/civil-engineering-magazine/article/2021/09/washington-and-oregon-place-equity-at-the-heart-of-i-5-bridge-replacement?utm_medium=email&utm_source=rasa_io&PostID=38357390&MessageRunDetailID= [login to see]
Are you ever ashamed of one of your primary organizations? I am with ASCE on this one. The idea of a bridge having equity in the sense of racism is silly. While this article goes on and on it doesn’t really say how their process is being fair other than having public meetings and listening to people.

Being a retired transportation official, I can tell you we had/have public meetings for every one of our projects big and small. On some of the projects we were able to incorporate some ideas the public wanted to see in the new road/bridge; many times, we could not. Why? Money/funding. Engineers in my day were educated to design all projects in accordance with cost-benefit methods taking into account future maintenance/replacement costs. In other words, we were cheap! I see way too much waste in today’s designs, my personal opinion.

I need to say something in defense of the long-gone transportation officials, engineers, and designers that are being maligned in today’s media for so called racist practices. I was trained by the last generations of engineers and designers that built our interstate system, and I am here to tell you there wasn’t a racist bone in their body, and they really knew what they were doing. These people staunchly believed they were the steward of the taxpayer’s money and that it is our job to get the most “bang for the buck” in every aspect of the project, big or small; every dollar needed to be looked at. That being said property acquisition costs are always looked at so I can see poorer neighborhoods being built through before more expensive ones, but even this wasn’t always the controlling factor: transportation project needs to look at the geometry of the road alignment as well as the soils that are being built on; the cost of potentially overcoming these problems will wipe out any savings in land costs.

In the case of this article, what they are saying is a little disingenuous when they say silty soils and imply an earthquake is right around the corner. When identifying the soil usually it’s 2 words, like maybe a silty clay, and then it depends what percentage of silt and clay you have, and if it is in a preconsolidated state or not. In the matter of seismic activity, it’s predicted as a probability assigned by a geographic area by historic events in the past and some other factors.

Well, I had my say, I’m sorry for being so long but I just get angry when I see politically correct bull shit creep into my profession.