<< According to official records, the design for the bridge shifted multiple times over the past seven years, largely due to conflicts between the Public Works Department (PWD) and the Railways. The two agencies couldn’t agree on how to share land, and in trying to work around both railway property and the new Metro line, they ended up producing a final layout with an abrupt 90-degree angle.
I love that mindset. Europeans would have simply refused and 100 years later it would have probably been build after all legal has been cleared. Indians instead never say no. That's how you build software, so why not bridges.
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.
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.
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".
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. ;)
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.
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?
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. :/
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/
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I think that's the parent's point, someone should have just said No. If you have to sacrifice so much due to whatever constraints you face, the resulting solution usually is not going to solve the original problem very well.
At the very least, I would have let it be known that I did not think the resulting bridge was a good design for traffic and has only been designed to appease the process. "I do not recommend constructing this design" would have been my CYA.
Someone should just say no to dark patterns, someone should just say no to layoffs that aren't actually necessary but bump share price, why aren't we all saying no more? Why does it have to be this obvious for this forum to conclude "Engineers should say no."
You get fired for saying no. Unless the government backs up qualified people saying no, by protecting them from the companies wrath, then you won’t get anyone saying no.
Caveat that this is targeted towards US software environment, I’m under the belief that engineers designing roads and buildings are actually accredited and protected in this way in some countries
I see plenty of people saying programmers should refuse to implement dark patterns. Layoffs aren't done by engineers.
In any case, you can't rely on people to do the right thing just because it's the right thing. Real engineers have skin in the game. They put their signature on stuff and they're responsible if it goes wrong. If it's particularly egregious, they can lose their license or even be criminally prosecuted. That's a powerful backstop against pressure coming from above. Software doesn't have this, so naturally people are much more likely to give in to that pressure.
I hate software built like this, it's hell and you end up with 4 different designs in your app by the time you hit production.
That's the kind of app that needs internal audit, where some objects are audited, but as the data is never used, the audit in fact only works on a fifth of the project and is never used.
This is a consequence of when there's neither collaboration or reasonableness between stakeholders, and when a project is driven forward by a bureaucracy. Those doing the actual work are ordered to do the impossible, even if the result under the given constraints is totally pointless.
The demand for yes-men stays huge. A manager comes, he wants yes-men. Things fail. Someone gets blamed and removed, maybe the manager himself. The circus continues. I wonder why capitalism doesn't remove this obvious inefficiency, but rather seems to promote it.
Fair, capitalism does in fact suffer from this. But so does every bureaucracy. For that matter, so did monarchy. So it seems to me to be a bit to single out capitalism.
In India, land is the most valuable thing in general and all land/housing/infra related industries are infested with politicians.
There are exceptions of course, and unless this company is one, they'll just be back with a new name, and the political party will be advertising to the public how they're so unbiased that they shut down the company of their own political brother.
I love that mindset. Europeans would have simply refused and 100 years later it would have probably been build after all legal has been cleared. Indians instead never say no. That's how you build software, so why not bridges.