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Thursday, June 26, 2014

Understanding The Job Of A Highway Engineer

By Carey Bourdier


Engineers are highly important professionals and these are the people who build homes for us, build our office buildings, build cars, and produce computers and appliances, and many others. Highway engineers on the other hand are the civil engineers who build and design our roads, city streets, highways and freeways, and those where we drive on.

Obviously designing safe and functional road systems is highly important and a poorly designed road not only can be difficult for drivers to use, it can be dangerous and deadly. The science of designing roads dates back to ancient times when the Romans began designing highly functional roads throughout their empire.

The highway engineers are tasked the job of designing and building roads and also make improvements of these. Before the breaking ground for a road system to be built is done, there is an environmental impact study that is conducted and includes studying what the road's impact on the environment and also the socio-economic impact that the road can have on the area and also the people.

Because traffic accidents are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, safety is the biggest concern of a highway engineer. The roads must be made safe for a huge variety of drivers in a myriad of driving conditions. An engineer will be concerned with the grade of the road and the angles of curves and turns, as well as the lane width and horizontal and vertical clearance. These are just a few factors that these engineers think about when designing roads.

Tools that measure the angles in horizontal and vertical planes are used, and this is called a theodolite, one among the many tools used by engineers in the process. Measuring the angles of slopes should also be done, and a clinometers or sometimes called inclinometer is used in the process. A very important skill that a good highway engineer should have is angle measurement, and he should have this. Other instruments including surveying equipment used in the design and building of roads can be available from Warren Knight and can be purchased from them, including clinometers and theodolites.

For those of you wanting to become a highway engineer, finding the schools and universities offering accredited programs for civil engineering should be done. This study course will let you undergo several math and science classes as well as those for highway design and also for traffic engineering. You can also have the civil engineering courses with much emphasis on road and highway design.




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