Amy Hayes - Building Bridges and Roads: Civil Engineers

There are several different types of civil engineers. A transportation engineer is a person who specializes in making sure people can travel in the safest, most efficient ways possible. This means they design all sorts of roads and paths, from highways to railroads.

Transportation engineers make sure roads are built according to safety guidelines. To do this, they use a lot of math and a branch of science called physics. This allows them to predict how fast the cars can safely go depending on how abruptly the road turns. They also decide how many lanes there should be. They can even determine how traffic jams will start and come up with ways to prevent them.

Railroads have to be designed by engineers, too. Its very important to make sure trains stay on the tracks.

Roads have been around a lot longer than engineers. So when did people decide it was a good idea to get civil engineers involved? Once cars became popular, roads became much more dangerous. People on horseback traveled at much slower speeds than people driving cars. Cars presented new problems that needed solutions.

In 1921, the state of Ohio created the first state Traffic Engineering Bureau in the country. They hired Harry E. Neal to help organize and number the highways in the state. Soon, Neal developed a plan to draw lines on the road to prevent cars from crashing into each other. The idea of hiring people to create rules for the road with signs, lines, and speed limits spread across the country.

Cars were the reason that civil engineers got involved with creating roads. Now every road has to be carefully planned to make sure its safe.

Structural engineers work on all kinds of large projects, including buildings and dams. One of their specialties is creating bridges. Roads can get you quite far, but what if you have to cross a river or a lake? Structural engineers work with architects and construction workers to make sure any bridge thats built can withstand great amounts of weight.

Structural engineers have to know a lot about materialshow strong they are and how they react under different conditions. Structural engineers have a good understanding of physics and chemistry, two branches of science. They also have to use math every day as they perform important calculations that deal with the size of their structure and how the weight of its users and the pull of gravity will affect it.

Structural engineers think about what kind of bridge design would be safest. They have to think about how many people will be crossing the bridge and how long it will be.