<< 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.
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.
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.
Personal anecdote: As a child I played a lot of Sim City. In those games bridges must be perfectly straight and as a result I developed a mental model that curved bridges simply don't exist. When I first drove over a gently curved bridge in my late 20's I felt a serious disturbance to an irrelevant worldview that I never questioned.
I first got hold of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas early in the summer holidays during my school years, which meant I was able to play nearly-uninterrupted (save for pesky things like sleep and food) for several days straight.
When I finally surfaced, and Mum drove me into town for something or other, I felt visceral panic that she was driving on the "wrong" side of the road.
I wonder if you could simulate driving on the left by 1) flipping the entire screen left-to-right, 2) flipping the controls left-to-right, and 3) getting really good at reading mirrored writing.
If you know how to mirror a display in Windows 11 I can try it in my sim rig and see if it works. I actually thought about doing that the other day for some reason, I think it would work.
It would be a super hacky way to just test, but you can do that with OBS set to capture the game output and then displaying the OBS capture. There's probably multiple other ways, but that would be a quick and easy way to test if you already have OBS installed
On a somewhat related note: the Game Cube and Wii editions of Zelda: Twilight Princess are mirror images of each other. If you're playing on a Game Cube, Link is left-handed, but he's right-handed on a Wii.
See I'm familiar with California and their "flying" interchanges which are often banked pretty substantially - having to walk along one once was an eye opener, they're really banked!
nothing like the 180 degree turn on having designs signed by multiple parties and then getting suspended for having it built, likely by the same parties.
#1 has stop signs. This is just like a regular T-intersection, but with one direction missing.
#2 is a bike path.
The one in India is designed for several hundred thousand people to pass through daily; it doesn't look like either of these is intended for those kinds of numbers.
There's an only partly paved parking lot in my city which, until recently, was named "lake (seasonal)". That name is gone, but the main photo still features cars in ankle-deep muddy water.
Milwaukee has a predominantly W-E interstate I-94, and when it hits Lake Michigan it simply turns 90 degrees, fairly sharply, to the south, and gets renamed to 794.
Confusingly, there is also a I-94 that also turns south a few thousand feet west of 794, and I94 and 794 run in parallel for several miles.
Note that only I-94 goes to Chicago; 794 just kind of "stops" at the Milwaukee airport.
If you'd like to see the cancelled "Lake Freeway" you can see parts of the partially constructed abandoned project in the movie "The Blues Brothers" from 1980. There is a long history of turmoil in the story of the "Lake Freeway" in Milwaukee, which seems to have dramatically negatively impacted the economic success of the local area due to generational uncertainty. Its a very poor city and their anti-poverty strategy seems to be periodic infrastructure demolition and reconstruction; it hasn't worked so far but they've only been trying that since WWII so maybe it'll work next time ...
(edit: to summarize, if you're trying to get to Chicago from the NW via I-94, if you end up on 794, you are very lost, but at least you've visited a VERY controversial construction project)
I'm sympathetic, in that I can easily see a situation where they were given constraints that kind of forced this. Still more than a little eye opening to see it actually built.
One of the design goals (a constraint if you will) was to pass 300,000 people a day. You gotta move fast for that, and there's no way to take that turn at any kind of speed. So it fails at its primary purpose.
BTW It's not uncommon these days that enshitification causes products to fail at their primary function. See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection. There have been several others, but I don't remember them. It's sad when a mechanical mercury switch has better up-time than fancy tech.
Yeah, I suspected this likely did not hold up to volume constraints. It may have been the highest volume they could hit with all of the other constraints?
Put differently, give engineering an unsolvable constraint set, expect engineering to drop some constraints. That is a management problem, not an engineering one, necessarily. (Granted, I'm assuming they didn't silently drop said constraints...)
It also looks narrow enough that even moderately sized cars would have trouble making that turn in both directions at the same time. Maybe it's an illusion due to the angles though.
Well you don’t need enshittification for that : in the early 2000s Sony released a digital music player that didn’t read mp3 but ATrac instead, and the provided converter was slow and buggy. Let’s say that consumers didn’t like it.
I’ve always wondered how they came to shoot themselves in the foot like that - any basic consumer or journalist test would have flagged that.
> See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection
Wait, what? I'd heard that they were deprecating the first gen Nest, but that it would still function as an offline programmable thermostat. Are you sure it won't be able to work in offline mode?
"pass 300,000 people a day"
This strikes me as implausible because it implies 208 cars per minute, 24x7
The picture looks like a driveway, and my local interstate has 75K cars/day at 65 MPH and takes 4 lanes and they're pondering making it a 6 lane due to massive congestion due to economic and population growth in the area. I'm looking forward to saving a lot of time after they build the 6 lane.
I would theorize this is merely an on-ramp to a road network that overall passes 300K. It might be adequate for that if its just a few thousand cars per day.
I'm also impressed they can carry 300K people/day on a $2.3M bridge. Not unusual to blow half a billion per mile on a reconstruction project for a large wide interstate in the USA. $2M will get you roughly a small freeway overpass in the USA. The picture in the article looks more like an overpass or onramp than a mainline bridge. A new, long, wide, heavy weight limit mainline bridge over a large river can exceed a quarter billion in the USA. Its possible they're clickbaiting calling a mere onramp a "bridge" as if they're replicating the florida keys LOL.
Traffic in India is a different beast. Your calculation assumes each person is in a separate car, but that is not common. Many people travel on motorcycles or mopeds, often with multiple people on each. Motorized 3-wheel rickshaws are common. There are buses, cars (often with multiple people per car), etc.
Yeah whenever I see people complain about some engineering thing, from catastrophic failure to difficulty to fix, I generally can assume it was constraint based rather than malicious intent.
Some hotel collapses? Do you blame the engineer who was rushed because they needed to open to begin making payments on the debt? If the engineer refused, they would have found someone else.
Some part of a car is difficult to fix? They needed to get 35mpg + have enough trunk space to fit a stroller.
When I see these stories, there is always a finger to point, but I don't think these are black and white. There are customers, governments, and financial considerations at play.
It's practically never malicious intent from engineers, but that's not even the justification for prosecution. It's criminal incompetence.
Engineers are held to high standards of safety over their works. In Canada they can opt to swear an oath, similar to the Hyppocratic, that they recognize the moral weight of their career on other's wellbeing. In most developed countries there are specific licenses that imply added judgmental weight on their work; simply having an engineering degree isn't even enough to legally call oneself an "engineer" in some jurisdictions.
I'm not saying the bosses aren't equally guilty, but the footsoldiers who chose to carry out those "illegal" orders are, in this case, very specifically trained and warned to not do so.
Can't say I see an issue here. As long as drivers are driving at a responsible speed (which any amount of traffic will guarantee ;) ), it does the job it needs to and adheres to the large amount of bureaucratic friction forced upon the engineering team. Hope the engineers receive better treatment in their future endeavors.
Without reading I knew it is about India. This maybe internet example to generate some LOLs but even "well made" highways, bridges, airports will appear crappy once one has experienced infrastructure in US or Europe. Even Many decades back I used to think why things are so crappy while taking up rotten, falling apart stairs to a government office building. And that too in a big city.
There are 2 main kind of people in India
1) Majority - suffering daily quietly while knowing things are not good despite whatever official data/reports say.
2) Internet yahoos - small minority with their money and big support slave underclass labor who find any fact as "insult to India", "racism" , "foreign interference" and so on
It is most definitely bad engineering as having a more gradual curve would’ve made it completely acceptable. Elements of corruption and “not my job” mindset.
Have you never worked on projects where the management wants to do things a certain way but you know it’s just plain wrong. The only option sometimes is to let the slow rolling disaster unfold or risk your own job. Obviously this only applies where you aren’t risking people’s lives, but there is an entire subreddit dedicated for this. (r/maliciouscompliance)
You answered this yourself. We’re not talking consumer products. We’re talking civil engineering for bridges. You also can’t just ship medical device software with no basic testing that could injure people in the software world. If someone asked me to ship regardless I’d get it in writing and ensure my objections were clearly stated and also in writing.
Part of the problem with the insane cost of living in first world countries is that saying no often means you probably don't get to live inside for the next few months. It tends to turn engineers into yes men.
The ones who plan ahead tend to not end up in these organizations to begin with since they have leeway to say no much earlier.
This comes up all the time on HN about terrible, failed software projects, and the same excuses get brought up. "But engineers are forced to build it!" "It's really the Manager's fault!" "It's really the PM's fault!"
The job of an Engineer implies a capacity for technical judgment and willingness to not do something if it's unsafe or doesn't make sense. Even if we're not official, licensed "Professional Engineers," we still need to make these calls and stop projects like this from happening. Whether it's building a ridiculous, unsafe bridge, or building ridiculous, defective software, if the engineer doesn't have the agency to stop it, who does?
Just letting it happen and letting it fail with a "malicious compliance" smirk on our faces is passive aggressive, and doesn't elevate our profession.
Sounds good, but doesn’t work. I still have bills to pay and a family to feed. If the cost of saying no is that I lose my job or get put in the doghouse without a promotion because a person with more influence got upset, I will put up with it and do whatever is asked of me. I may leave the company later if I find another job and they might also find another person to replace me, but that project is moving forward one way or the other.
Again, if I’m being asked to risk people’s lives, I’d push back harder and resign if I can’t change minds, but I’m not doing any of that to “elevate our profession”.
The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.
The only way to make this kind of thing work is by threatening to send people to jail. Like building-engineers having to report asbestos, or electricians being forced to report code violations and authorities actually following up on it. Of course regulation is like kryptonite for the engineering/HN crowd, so let's keep building shit on thoughts and prayers.
> The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.
i don't think that's necessarily the case. civil engineering implies personal responsibility. we get to pretend like our bad choices don't have real-world impacts because we don't have a universal standards board or mandated ethical guidelines for computer engineering (in the vast majority of cases).
You just repeated my example. GP was talking about software. Even you are. As I already said, Civil Engineers have responsibilities either because of regulation and professional guilds, not because they just "want to elevate the profession".
As long as software engineers can be fired for denying to do things asked by people in power, "standards" and "ethics" take second place. This applies to virtually every profession, so maybe start making bad bosses and bad managers take actual responsibility for their irresponsibility before blaming on engineers.
In life there is no responsibility when there is no autonomy. And as much as certain crowds love to say "just walk way", giving away your means of survival is also not real autonomy. This is not WW2.
A soldier in combat deals with life or death in ways which are far more direct than a Boeing aircraft sometimes having its door blown off. Soldiers in combat may choose for people to die as a product of moral vision, not accidents.
But we all know the reality of whether we expect moral pushback from the armed forces for just about anything.
Was it a good deal when hundreds of thousands of bystanders died in Iraq? It doesn't matter. It's not the place of the rank and file to question authority, regardless of constitution this or moral that. The same is true for rank and file engineers.
Is it possible that the people who set the constraints are different from the people who design the bridge, who again are different from the people who approve the design? Yes, that's how it works in the real world.
As a design engineer, all you can do is explain to the stakeholders how the constraints will affect the outcome and suggest alternatives.
Ultimately, the engineers will have to work with what they are given, and as long as the outcome is safe and its limitations are communicated, they can't be blamed.
"Seven Engineers fired for refusing to design bridge"
Unemployment is a different constraint, but still a very real one. Doesn't matter now principled you are, there's always someone who'll take the money that isn't. Maybe these seven were the scabs and the heroes who said "no" are just forgotten.
That it's bad engineering isn't in dispute though. My point was that framing this as an "engineering decision" at all relies on context not included in the story. Someone who followed your Sound Engineering advice to the letter might be starving in the background of that photo. The problem is elsewhere.
I mean say no, get fired, and somebody else will sign off on it. The broken bridge will get built regardless of you bravely taking a stand and destroying your career.
You think the corrupt politicians didn’t know about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see it’s fucked.
That engineering signoff is a rubber stamp on a corrupt project. Fire the politicians not the person who has to rubber stamp it (because again, they’ll find somebody to signoff on it… the signoff is a mere formality on a project like this)
I periodically get told by my Product Manager that I’m thinking with my managerial hat on, again.
I joined a company as lead [software] engineer because I prefer that track while I have experience in management and C-Suite. dumb product and marketing decisions impact some engineering work, and I know the solutions for
I mostly avoid saying anything except when solving those things is the answer to the goals the PM keeps asking me about. When I do say things I’m told not to.
misaligned incentives between different government fiefdoms led to nearly impossible constraints, which led to a design silly from an engineering perspective
meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers had to choose between refusing to design something silly, vs putting food on the table for their family
Reminds me a bit of the Park Avenue Viaduct in NYC, which has what looks like 90-degree turns when viewed from street level, but apparently the roadway itself has (sharp) curves:
This looks like a fantastic bicycle path. Or I guess they could put a traffic light at the corner and have each direction take turns; I think there's enough room for a one-lane-wide turning radius.
> Photos of the sharp turn, which appears midway through the elevated roadway, exploded on Indian social media, prompting disbelief and concern. Drivers expressed confusion about how to navigate the turn safely.
Someone posted a top view of it and its not as bad as it look. But it would really depend on the expected level of traffic, target speed and if any big vehicles are going to use it. I feel like they could have started the curve a little earlier it would have worked out.
Classic management failure where they throw the engineers under the bus. This is a textbook example of a high power distance culture. India has an incredibly high power distance, meaning that it is very rare to question those above you and subordinates are expected to execute orders without pushback. Anybody that's worked with offshore/nearshore teams in cost center environments knows exactly what I'm talking about. Such folks are very well meaning but will attempt to execute a ticket exactly as it's written even if what is written is impossible.
In all reality everybody down the food chain knew this was a stupid design but the culture prevented them from speaking up (go ahead, be the nail that gets hammered down! plenty of other people will gladly take your job and do what they are told. explain to your family why you can't put food on the table... or just smile, nod and do what you are told (which is probably some variant of pass that hot potato onto some other poor sap that will in turn do the same thing))
This isn't a blanket statement - there are plenty of Indian engineers I've worked with in real tech companies that are not at all afraid to push boundaries, cause fusses, say no to even the top of the food chain, etc. But the type of environment I'm describing is very different.
The real failure was at the management/political level where the impossible constraints were created, but the cultural dynamic ensured no engineer felt empowered to refuse the task. This is no different than any other case where management throws the engineers under the bus for a mess they caused.
Not acknowledging who is really at fault (hint: not the engineers) plays right into the corrupt politicians who greenlit this in the first thing. You think they were somehow in the dark about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see that shits fucked. Everybody top to bottom knew it.
Why is it named "Rail Over Bridge", when the picture clearly shows the bridge is over the railroad? What's with the need to define acronyms all the time in writing like this ("ROB"? "Public Works Department (PWD)" for example?)
It's confusing but you can read it as (Rail Over) Bridge.
Defining acronyms/initializations the first time they are used is best practice[1]; I hate the opposite of just throwing around acronyms that the reader may not be familiar with.
OT: May be vice also needs to suspend a few folks as their website is egregious to use with full page intrusive ads. FFS please. I don't mind the ads but this is just too much. I am pretty sure I am not going to be clicking on vice links again.
After you commission a project, you don't micromanage it, you assume that the professionals you hand it to can do it better than you.
Should the politician who assigned the contract be fired too? How about the public who voted for them and didn't say anything while the bridge was being built?
It stops with whoever was responsible for signing-off the final design, and that must have been the local government authority.
So yes, ultimately the politician(s) should be taking this one. Certainly not the engineers, who it seems had to work around conflicting and shifting requirements, quite likely objecting at every step.
I'm sure they did, but that was the only way to check all the boxes. It still fulfills its purpose, albeit badly for this particular bit. It's classic "users will work around it" mindset; 75% of the project is still fine!
And yet somehow, bad planning like this can be seen every day in cycling paths. It's almost as if the planners think it would be acceptable there. To which I clearly say: no, it's not! In fact even less so than for cars are losing your momentum and regaining costs significantly more energy than a press on the accelerator!
The feeling I get from the article is that the engineers basically received specs that were nothing short of idiotic, were given no choice but to implement it and now are getting the blame.
It's easy to point the finger at them and say "why did you greenlight this?", but I'm quite sure they are completely expendable in this shitshow and the people actually responsible would've simply gotten some batch of new engineers who would've greenlit it in the end anyway.
Sure, but as a licensed engineer, you're signing off on the design as being safe and fit for purpose.
What if their manager had insisted they use cheaper concrete or less rebar? At a certain point, you have to refuse to put your signature on to something.
It's not entirely clear how far up the chain of command the suspensions go, but if they're including decision makers in the suspension, I think it's a good lesson to others to not just rubber stamp designs.
Sorry, I'm going to take this to the extreme. If you boss put a gun in your hand and told you to end someone's life, you would say no or go to prison for murder.
But somehow it's suddenly acceptable to debate when the gun is abstracted a tiny bit to say "make a bridge that absolutely will kill multiple people if it's used"?
The entire point of the "licensed" part of "licensed engineers" is to have someone we trust to say "absolutely not" and hold the line, or they personally get held accountable.
Did all of you conveniently forget the mandatory ethics courses in STEM education after the NYC scaffold incident killed a dozen people?
<< 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.
Shouldn't the bureaucracies be penalized, instead of the poor engineers?
The engineers built the 90-degree layout specified by their clients!
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a paper trail documenting the engineers' objections, signed and notarized by the clients.
It's hard for me to judge the engineers without knowing more.
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.
This doesn't look unsafe though, just inconvenient.
Both in the US[1] and UK[2] you can find bridges with actual 90-degree angles. The one in India[3] is more like 75 degrees.
[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/3CBqVHbVEtonHjcr9 [2]https://maps.app.goo.gl/8cVB44VDJRPadY6s6 [3]https://maps.app.goo.gl/ikPSmLEGYwVJLqDz7
Those are not the same at all.
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.
An elegant solution to this problem would be to enforce a very low speed limit entering the turn.
“Sharp turn ahead, reduce speed to 5 km/h”
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 am curious, how did you find those?
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.
The second link is in Canada.
"New Westminster, British Columbia" lol. It looked nothing like the UK but at least they didn't plump for Colombia!
Anyway, here is a real British one:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/VAdfguBXNcDB74Yu5
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.
That is my mistake, very sorry for that. Apparently that changed all the way back in 1867. Oops.
Lmao that quayside bike lane is diabolical. Suicidal.
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 article says:
> 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.
Sometimes we are paid to say “no”.
More often we are paid to say “yes”
It might have been a bit of wishful thinking.
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.
That's the role of a professional standards organization: to protect the public.
If that doesn't exist, you don't have protection for yourself, you only have your own ethics. It's more important, and also more dangerous.
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.
Depends entirely on the culture. Some cultures saying “no” is simply not what you do.
That doesn’t sound like a good justification.
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.
They worked with the land they were allowed to use, and it ended up like this. Not even a money issue, just bureaus refusing to cooperate.
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
You get fired for saying no
The people in the article said yes and also got fired.
But it took longer to get fired after saying yes, and they were paid the whole time.
>it took longer to get fired after saying yes, and they were paid the whole time.
It's even worse than merely being fired from the project though, they were suspended.
Nobody saw it coming, but it turned out to be a "suspension bridge" after all ;)
Of course they did! That is exactly what managements plan was! You think the corrupt politicians that greenlit this thing are going to take the fall?
You think the people at the top weren’t aware this thing was unworkable?
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.
Please say 'no' more often.
You’re right but:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2024/07/09/new-ghent-motorway-b...
Belgium has run into the same problem and they went on with it
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 only way it could get funnier is if the roadway had to be inverted 180 degrees like a roller coaster at some point.
Or a large pole with seven cables from its tip were installed at the vertex, making the project a literal suspension bridge.
yeah lovely mindset now the engineers will go to jail
Good, they approved an design that's unsafe for road users. Better to put engineers in jail, instead of someone dying from car crash on unsafe bridge.
On the other hand the Indians have blacklisted the firms involved.
The European mindset seems to be to let them keep doing stuff - e.g. Fujitsu in the UK.
Oh don't worry.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if having bridges with 90 degrees angles is often better than having no bridges.
Government bureaucracies are rather far from "capitalism".
Yes but this problem exists in capitalism too. Name one big company that doesn't suffer from this issue.
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.
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Personal anecdote: As a child I played a lot of Sim City. In those games bridges must be perfectly straight and as a result I developed a mental model that curved bridges simply don't exist. When I first drove over a gently curved bridge in my late 20's I felt a serious disturbance to an irrelevant worldview that I never questioned.
I first got hold of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas early in the summer holidays during my school years, which meant I was able to play nearly-uninterrupted (save for pesky things like sleep and food) for several days straight.
When I finally surfaced, and Mum drove me into town for something or other, I felt visceral panic that she was driving on the "wrong" side of the road.
I wonder if you could simulate driving on the left by 1) flipping the entire screen left-to-right, 2) flipping the controls left-to-right, and 3) getting really good at reading mirrored writing.
If you know how to mirror a display in Windows 11 I can try it in my sim rig and see if it works. I actually thought about doing that the other day for some reason, I think it would work.
It would be a super hacky way to just test, but you can do that with OBS set to capture the game output and then displaying the OBS capture. There's probably multiple other ways, but that would be a quick and easy way to test if you already have OBS installed
On a somewhat related note: the Game Cube and Wii editions of Zelda: Twilight Princess are mirror images of each other. If you're playing on a Game Cube, Link is left-handed, but he's right-handed on a Wii.
Or just buy a truck simulator on steam and experience it without hacks ಡ ͜ ʖ ಡ
Shame only the first installment of the series had an expansion pack set in London.
You must be in a left hand drive country?
Based on the use of "Mum", very probably.
Coming from the same area, I didn’t even think that it might look odd to folks in other parts of the world …
See I'm familiar with California and their "flying" interchanges which are often banked pretty substantially - having to walk along one once was an eye opener, they're really banked!
This isn't really a 90 degree turn. The photo is just taken from an angle that makes it look that way.
It's more like 120 degrees which is still bad.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/9PAhGVaVzCRv1hfx7
I think i would call that a 60 degree a turn. A 120 degree turn would be quite something!
nothing like the 180 degree turn on having designs signed by multiple parties and then getting suspended for having it built, likely by the same parties.
Yes you're quite right. I clearly need my morning coffee.
In the US[1] and UK[2] you can find bridges with actual 90-degree angles that look a lot more dangerous than the Indian one.
[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/3CBqVHbVEtonHjcr9 [2]https://maps.app.goo.gl/8cVB44VDJRPadY6s6
#1 has stop signs. This is just like a regular T-intersection, but with one direction missing.
#2 is a bike path.
The one in India is designed for several hundred thousand people to pass through daily; it doesn't look like either of these is intended for those kinds of numbers.
FYI I see cars on street view for #2 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hPuDQRTfcRKBkmRb9
Sharrows are just car roads with bikes painted on them :)
It is actually on Google Maps as a place named,
"100° Aishbag Railway Bridge (Iconic Engineering Landmark)"
https://maps.app.goo.gl/jQx1yMs1X9sAaReC7
Ironic Google Maps locations are amazing.
There's an only partly paved parking lot in my city which, until recently, was named "lake (seasonal)". That name is gone, but the main photo still features cars in ankle-deep muddy water.
Agreed that is not so bad
I see this and I raise you this Lake Shore S-curve
https://chicagoyimby.com/2023/08/lost-legends-8-the-lake-sho...
I see your Lake Shore S-curve and raise you the Temple Run highway.
https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-in-india...
It's like a level of Super Sprint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Sprint#/media/File:ARC_S...).
There’s also an absurdly short left-side entrance ramp onto northbound LSD right around there as well. Always terrifying.
Speaking of Lake Michigan, can someone from Cleveland weigh in here?
I have a memory of driving into Cleveland on a multi-lane highway in the 80's or 90's and encountering a 90-degree turn when it got to the lake.
Or am I thinking of another city?
Can confirm - it’s colloquially known as “dead man’s curve”, just east of the heart of the city.
Yes, Interstate 90 in Cleveland. It is still there, and still a large number of crashes.
Milwaukee has a predominantly W-E interstate I-94, and when it hits Lake Michigan it simply turns 90 degrees, fairly sharply, to the south, and gets renamed to 794. Confusingly, there is also a I-94 that also turns south a few thousand feet west of 794, and I94 and 794 run in parallel for several miles. Note that only I-94 goes to Chicago; 794 just kind of "stops" at the Milwaukee airport. If you'd like to see the cancelled "Lake Freeway" you can see parts of the partially constructed abandoned project in the movie "The Blues Brothers" from 1980. There is a long history of turmoil in the story of the "Lake Freeway" in Milwaukee, which seems to have dramatically negatively impacted the economic success of the local area due to generational uncertainty. Its a very poor city and their anti-poverty strategy seems to be periodic infrastructure demolition and reconstruction; it hasn't worked so far but they've only been trying that since WWII so maybe it'll work next time ... (edit: to summarize, if you're trying to get to Chicago from the NW via I-94, if you end up on 794, you are very lost, but at least you've visited a VERY controversial construction project)
I'm sympathetic, in that I can easily see a situation where they were given constraints that kind of forced this. Still more than a little eye opening to see it actually built.
One of the design goals (a constraint if you will) was to pass 300,000 people a day. You gotta move fast for that, and there's no way to take that turn at any kind of speed. So it fails at its primary purpose.
BTW It's not uncommon these days that enshitification causes products to fail at their primary function. See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection. There have been several others, but I don't remember them. It's sad when a mechanical mercury switch has better up-time than fancy tech.
Yeah, I suspected this likely did not hold up to volume constraints. It may have been the highest volume they could hit with all of the other constraints?
Put differently, give engineering an unsolvable constraint set, expect engineering to drop some constraints. That is a management problem, not an engineering one, necessarily. (Granted, I'm assuming they didn't silently drop said constraints...)
The engineering problem here is how best to establish a paper trail.
It also looks narrow enough that even moderately sized cars would have trouble making that turn in both directions at the same time. Maybe it's an illusion due to the angles though.
Do they have to survive the crossing as part of the specs?
Given that its India, I struggle to imagine any movement about 10mph
Well you don’t need enshittification for that : in the early 2000s Sony released a digital music player that didn’t read mp3 but ATrac instead, and the provided converter was slow and buggy. Let’s say that consumers didn’t like it.
I’ve always wondered how they came to shoot themselves in the foot like that - any basic consumer or journalist test would have flagged that.
> See the original Google Nest thermostat failing to turn on the heat without an internet connection
Wait, what? I'd heard that they were deprecating the first gen Nest, but that it would still function as an offline programmable thermostat. Are you sure it won't be able to work in offline mode?
"pass 300,000 people a day" This strikes me as implausible because it implies 208 cars per minute, 24x7
The picture looks like a driveway, and my local interstate has 75K cars/day at 65 MPH and takes 4 lanes and they're pondering making it a 6 lane due to massive congestion due to economic and population growth in the area. I'm looking forward to saving a lot of time after they build the 6 lane.
I would theorize this is merely an on-ramp to a road network that overall passes 300K. It might be adequate for that if its just a few thousand cars per day.
I'm also impressed they can carry 300K people/day on a $2.3M bridge. Not unusual to blow half a billion per mile on a reconstruction project for a large wide interstate in the USA. $2M will get you roughly a small freeway overpass in the USA. The picture in the article looks more like an overpass or onramp than a mainline bridge. A new, long, wide, heavy weight limit mainline bridge over a large river can exceed a quarter billion in the USA. Its possible they're clickbaiting calling a mere onramp a "bridge" as if they're replicating the florida keys LOL.
Traffic in India is a different beast. Your calculation assumes each person is in a separate car, but that is not common. Many people travel on motorcycles or mopeds, often with multiple people on each. Motorized 3-wheel rickshaws are common. There are buses, cars (often with multiple people per car), etc.
Yeah whenever I see people complain about some engineering thing, from catastrophic failure to difficulty to fix, I generally can assume it was constraint based rather than malicious intent.
Some hotel collapses? Do you blame the engineer who was rushed because they needed to open to begin making payments on the debt? If the engineer refused, they would have found someone else.
Some part of a car is difficult to fix? They needed to get 35mpg + have enough trunk space to fit a stroller.
When I see these stories, there is always a finger to point, but I don't think these are black and white. There are customers, governments, and financial considerations at play.
It's practically never malicious intent from engineers, but that's not even the justification for prosecution. It's criminal incompetence.
Engineers are held to high standards of safety over their works. In Canada they can opt to swear an oath, similar to the Hyppocratic, that they recognize the moral weight of their career on other's wellbeing. In most developed countries there are specific licenses that imply added judgmental weight on their work; simply having an engineering degree isn't even enough to legally call oneself an "engineer" in some jurisdictions.
I'm not saying the bosses aren't equally guilty, but the footsoldiers who chose to carry out those "illegal" orders are, in this case, very specifically trained and warned to not do so.
There's a bridge with TWO 90-degree turns in Athens, Greece. I've always thought it was an odd design: https://maps.app.goo.gl/j4hzcGKH8b2XdFbJ8
This honestly seems safer than the OP since there's no way you could get up to speed on the tiny perpendicular leg
I’m surprised, in Vietnam we have a really 90 degree bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFrDVtCuUNc
They chose the right angle. They chose the wrong angle.
Can't say I see an issue here. As long as drivers are driving at a responsible speed (which any amount of traffic will guarantee ;) ), it does the job it needs to and adheres to the large amount of bureaucratic friction forced upon the engineering team. Hope the engineers receive better treatment in their future endeavors.
Without reading I knew it is about India. This maybe internet example to generate some LOLs but even "well made" highways, bridges, airports will appear crappy once one has experienced infrastructure in US or Europe. Even Many decades back I used to think why things are so crappy while taking up rotten, falling apart stairs to a government office building. And that too in a big city.
There are 2 main kind of people in India
1) Majority - suffering daily quietly while knowing things are not good despite whatever official data/reports say.
2) Internet yahoos - small minority with their money and big support slave underclass labor who find any fact as "insult to India", "racism" , "foreign interference" and so on
There have literally always been (at least) two kinds of people in India, and that class system feeds this sort of poor public planning.
Here's one from my local area. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5457837,-121.7265539,3a,75y,...
It's not bad actually. It's a three-way bridge. The right angle part is ped/bike only.
So, not at all relevant.
That's one conclusion you could come to.
Bad engineering or impossible constraints?
It is not a 90 degree bridge but more of a 120 degree bridge as seen here: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/action-taken-against...
It is most definitely bad engineering as having a more gradual curve would’ve made it completely acceptable. Elements of corruption and “not my job” mindset.
I believe you meant more of a 60 not 120.
Potentially both. If there are impossible constraints, then at a certain point you do _not_ build the impossible bridge, you say no instead.
I am at a loss with all of the “well they were forced into it” comments. Don’t build it.
Have you never worked on projects where the management wants to do things a certain way but you know it’s just plain wrong. The only option sometimes is to let the slow rolling disaster unfold or risk your own job. Obviously this only applies where you aren’t risking people’s lives, but there is an entire subreddit dedicated for this. (r/maliciouscompliance)
You answered this yourself. We’re not talking consumer products. We’re talking civil engineering for bridges. You also can’t just ship medical device software with no basic testing that could injure people in the software world. If someone asked me to ship regardless I’d get it in writing and ensure my objections were clearly stated and also in writing.
But you’d still ship… and that’s my point.
Also, depending on the org, you may or may not come out unscathed on the other side.
Part of the problem with the insane cost of living in first world countries is that saying no often means you probably don't get to live inside for the next few months. It tends to turn engineers into yes men.
The ones who plan ahead tend to not end up in these organizations to begin with since they have leeway to say no much earlier.
This comes up all the time on HN about terrible, failed software projects, and the same excuses get brought up. "But engineers are forced to build it!" "It's really the Manager's fault!" "It's really the PM's fault!"
The job of an Engineer implies a capacity for technical judgment and willingness to not do something if it's unsafe or doesn't make sense. Even if we're not official, licensed "Professional Engineers," we still need to make these calls and stop projects like this from happening. Whether it's building a ridiculous, unsafe bridge, or building ridiculous, defective software, if the engineer doesn't have the agency to stop it, who does?
Just letting it happen and letting it fail with a "malicious compliance" smirk on our faces is passive aggressive, and doesn't elevate our profession.
Sounds good, but doesn’t work. I still have bills to pay and a family to feed. If the cost of saying no is that I lose my job or get put in the doghouse without a promotion because a person with more influence got upset, I will put up with it and do whatever is asked of me. I may leave the company later if I find another job and they might also find another person to replace me, but that project is moving forward one way or the other.
Again, if I’m being asked to risk people’s lives, I’d push back harder and resign if I can’t change minds, but I’m not doing any of that to “elevate our profession”.
The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.
The only way to make this kind of thing work is by threatening to send people to jail. Like building-engineers having to report asbestos, or electricians being forced to report code violations and authorities actually following up on it. Of course regulation is like kryptonite for the engineering/HN crowd, so let's keep building shit on thoughts and prayers.
> The day landlords start accepting "integrity" and "elevating the profession" as payment for the rent is the day that engineers will do what you're saying.
i don't think that's necessarily the case. civil engineering implies personal responsibility. we get to pretend like our bad choices don't have real-world impacts because we don't have a universal standards board or mandated ethical guidelines for computer engineering (in the vast majority of cases).
You just repeated my example. GP was talking about software. Even you are. As I already said, Civil Engineers have responsibilities either because of regulation and professional guilds, not because they just "want to elevate the profession".
As long as software engineers can be fired for denying to do things asked by people in power, "standards" and "ethics" take second place. This applies to virtually every profession, so maybe start making bad bosses and bad managers take actual responsibility for their irresponsibility before blaming on engineers.
In life there is no responsibility when there is no autonomy. And as much as certain crowds love to say "just walk way", giving away your means of survival is also not real autonomy. This is not WW2.
A soldier in combat deals with life or death in ways which are far more direct than a Boeing aircraft sometimes having its door blown off. Soldiers in combat may choose for people to die as a product of moral vision, not accidents.
But we all know the reality of whether we expect moral pushback from the armed forces for just about anything.
Was it a good deal when hundreds of thousands of bystanders died in Iraq? It doesn't matter. It's not the place of the rank and file to question authority, regardless of constitution this or moral that. The same is true for rank and file engineers.
Is it possible that the people who set the constraints are different from the people who design the bridge, who again are different from the people who approve the design? Yes, that's how it works in the real world.
As a design engineer, all you can do is explain to the stakeholders how the constraints will affect the outcome and suggest alternatives.
Ultimately, the engineers will have to work with what they are given, and as long as the outcome is safe and its limitations are communicated, they can't be blamed.
No one is going to pay you to work on something nice. They'd just do it themselves.
The results weren't safe, so the engineers definitely can still be blamed.
"Seven Engineers fired for refusing to design bridge"
Unemployment is a different constraint, but still a very real one. Doesn't matter now principled you are, there's always someone who'll take the money that isn't. Maybe these seven were the scabs and the heroes who said "no" are just forgotten.
It's still bad engineering. "They made me do it" isn't an excuse.
That it's bad engineering isn't in dispute though. My point was that framing this as an "engineering decision" at all relies on context not included in the story. Someone who followed your Sound Engineering advice to the letter might be starving in the background of that photo. The problem is elsewhere.
I mean say no, get fired, and somebody else will sign off on it. The broken bridge will get built regardless of you bravely taking a stand and destroying your career.
You think the corrupt politicians didn’t know about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see it’s fucked.
That engineering signoff is a rubber stamp on a corrupt project. Fire the politicians not the person who has to rubber stamp it (because again, they’ll find somebody to signoff on it… the signoff is a mere formality on a project like this)
I periodically get told by my Product Manager that I’m thinking with my managerial hat on, again.
I joined a company as lead [software] engineer because I prefer that track while I have experience in management and C-Suite. dumb product and marketing decisions impact some engineering work, and I know the solutions for
I mostly avoid saying anything except when solving those things is the answer to the goals the PM keeps asking me about. When I do say things I’m told not to.
Enjoy your proverbial 90 degree turns!
I have this problem two, in both directions!
When I don't bring things up, I wind up sitting in a tedious and insulting retrospective meeting about "what went wrong"
When I do bring things up I get told "don't worry too much about that, that's the PMs job and they have it all figured out"
That is why I build a "paper trail" via email or chat when I predict things might go wrong and managers still insist to doing things.
Why not both?
potentially both, driven by misaligned incentives
misaligned incentives between different government fiefdoms led to nearly impossible constraints, which led to a design silly from an engineering perspective
meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers had to choose between refusing to design something silly, vs putting food on the table for their family
They're most likely just scapegoats for entities surrounding the area who won't give land for a proper construction.
Engineers are rarely making these kind of high level decisions. Next time they can fire workers who built the bridge.
> the construction firms behind the project have been blacklisted.
Close old company, start new one. Problem solved!
I would call them "persons who manage to get engineering degrees" rather than engineers.
I built bridges like this all the time in the level editor of the ancient racing game Stunts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
Seems the issue is with the radius of the turn, and not the degrees?
Reminds me a bit of the Park Avenue Viaduct in NYC, which has what looks like 90-degree turns when viewed from street level, but apparently the roadway itself has (sharp) curves:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/40.752323/-73.977539
Who are that people saying engineers were wrong ? - for sure they are not competent.
Satisfying all the constraints ? - well done, difficult, but great work !
And nice bridge - good to have, task finished. Better access is something that can be worked out later on.
(you get what you give)
This looks like a fantastic bicycle path. Or I guess they could put a traffic light at the corner and have each direction take turns; I think there's enough room for a one-lane-wide turning radius.
Reminds me of this overpass in Lynnwood Washington.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/CKrJFsAjcTd6wbYn6?g_st=ipc
Oh, that's fun. It's even got a ghost ramp - I wonder what the original plan was there.
Engineering by committee
Vice is still alive? I thought they went bust?
There is a town in North Wales with a bridge called “The H Bridge” (presumably because it is shaped like the letter H) so four right angle turns!
Clearly the engineers are being made scapegoats
Are cars intended to drive on that or just pedestrian walking / bicycling?
The trouble is that it will actually solve traffic problems by rewarding non-drivers instead of incentivizing car usage with yet more capacity.
> Photos of the sharp turn, which appears midway through the elevated roadway, exploded on Indian social media, prompting disbelief and concern. Drivers expressed confusion about how to navigate the turn safely.
Looks like drivers
From context, must be cars. This sort of thing is perfectly fine (and fairly common) for pedestrian bridges.
Someone posted a top view of it and its not as bad as it look. But it would really depend on the expected level of traffic, target speed and if any big vehicles are going to use it. I feel like they could have started the curve a little earlier it would have worked out.
I refuse to believe there were any actual engineers involved in that
True problem solvers. They solved a political problem, but created a real one. Certainly not engineering ethos torch-bearers.
However, they did meet spec. I’d fire leadership first.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
Classic management failure where they throw the engineers under the bus. This is a textbook example of a high power distance culture. India has an incredibly high power distance, meaning that it is very rare to question those above you and subordinates are expected to execute orders without pushback. Anybody that's worked with offshore/nearshore teams in cost center environments knows exactly what I'm talking about. Such folks are very well meaning but will attempt to execute a ticket exactly as it's written even if what is written is impossible.
In all reality everybody down the food chain knew this was a stupid design but the culture prevented them from speaking up (go ahead, be the nail that gets hammered down! plenty of other people will gladly take your job and do what they are told. explain to your family why you can't put food on the table... or just smile, nod and do what you are told (which is probably some variant of pass that hot potato onto some other poor sap that will in turn do the same thing))
This isn't a blanket statement - there are plenty of Indian engineers I've worked with in real tech companies that are not at all afraid to push boundaries, cause fusses, say no to even the top of the food chain, etc. But the type of environment I'm describing is very different.
The real failure was at the management/political level where the impossible constraints were created, but the cultural dynamic ensured no engineer felt empowered to refuse the task. This is no different than any other case where management throws the engineers under the bus for a mess they caused.
Not acknowledging who is really at fault (hint: not the engineers) plays right into the corrupt politicians who greenlit this in the first thing. You think they were somehow in the dark about the design of this bridge? It doesn’t take a genius engineer to see that shits fucked. Everybody top to bottom knew it.
Why is it named "Rail Over Bridge", when the picture clearly shows the bridge is over the railroad? What's with the need to define acronyms all the time in writing like this ("ROB"? "Public Works Department (PWD)" for example?)
It's confusing but you can read it as (Rail Over) Bridge.
Defining acronyms/initializations the first time they are used is best practice[1]; I hate the opposite of just throwing around acronyms that the reader may not be familiar with.
[1] "Define them the first time you use them in content" https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...
AP Stylebook says "avoid alphabet soup."
Good writers refrain from unnecessary acronyms (I refer to plain language rules, or "plr").
Probably a case of lost in translation.
It looks stupid, but in practice is it really much different from an on/off ramp?
If it is for cars, then it is very problematic design.
Why? Cars can easily make a 90 turn. It happens at almost every intersection
OT: May be vice also needs to suspend a few folks as their website is egregious to use with full page intrusive ads. FFS please. I don't mind the ads but this is just too much. I am pretty sure I am not going to be clicking on vice links again.
Consider downloading UBlock. Looks great with an adblocker
Um, isn't this normal?
My city has one of these. https://maps.app.goo.gl/GiNq1DmnDs5aTaRM8
Looks perfectly usable for pedestrians, bicyclists, e-scooters/rollers,...
Nice jugaad
AI gone bad.
What are the 90-degree turns of software engineering? Plaintext passwords?
Wanting to have a secure E2E encrypted system with a backdoor for law enforcement.
Modals.
No place to put this widget? Let me just place it riiight here.
Client-side-only validation?
Only activate the emissions controls when you detect you're in an emissions test.
Using the term "engineering" for what we previously called programming, for one.
I agree! I only used it in this bridge context.
So they didn't spot this 'problem' in the design review?
That's who should be fired.
They probably did?
After you commission a project, you don't micromanage it, you assume that the professionals you hand it to can do it better than you.
Should the politician who assigned the contract be fired too? How about the public who voted for them and didn't say anything while the bridge was being built?
The blame's gotta stop somewhere.
It stops with whoever was responsible for signing-off the final design, and that must have been the local government authority.
So yes, ultimately the politician(s) should be taking this one. Certainly not the engineers, who it seems had to work around conflicting and shifting requirements, quite likely objecting at every step.
I'm sure they did, but that was the only way to check all the boxes. It still fulfills its purpose, albeit badly for this particular bit. It's classic "users will work around it" mindset; 75% of the project is still fine!
I immediately thought about the innumerable versions of this comic: https://imgflip.com/i/4uhwsx
... check all the boxes. It still fulfills its purpose ...
No, you can't pass 300,000 a day when they have to slow down for that turn.
They underestimated the power of public backlash on social media.
And yet somehow, bad planning like this can be seen every day in cycling paths. It's almost as if the planners think it would be acceptable there. To which I clearly say: no, it's not! In fact even less so than for cars are losing your momentum and regaining costs significantly more energy than a press on the accelerator!
if ai agents built bridges
Now you know why all your software is f*ckd up!!!
The feeling I get from the article is that the engineers basically received specs that were nothing short of idiotic, were given no choice but to implement it and now are getting the blame.
It's easy to point the finger at them and say "why did you greenlight this?", but I'm quite sure they are completely expendable in this shitshow and the people actually responsible would've simply gotten some batch of new engineers who would've greenlit it in the end anyway.
Sure, but as a licensed engineer, you're signing off on the design as being safe and fit for purpose.
What if their manager had insisted they use cheaper concrete or less rebar? At a certain point, you have to refuse to put your signature on to something.
It's not entirely clear how far up the chain of command the suspensions go, but if they're including decision makers in the suspension, I think it's a good lesson to others to not just rubber stamp designs.
Sorry, I'm going to take this to the extreme. If you boss put a gun in your hand and told you to end someone's life, you would say no or go to prison for murder.
But somehow it's suddenly acceptable to debate when the gun is abstracted a tiny bit to say "make a bridge that absolutely will kill multiple people if it's used"?
The entire point of the "licensed" part of "licensed engineers" is to have someone we trust to say "absolutely not" and hold the line, or they personally get held accountable.
Did all of you conveniently forget the mandatory ethics courses in STEM education after the NYC scaffold incident killed a dozen people?
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Can we blacklist websites that hijack the back button like this? Makes it very frustrating to browse on mobile.
What browser are you using? I don't have any issues on Safari iOS
Firefox mobile, I only get hijacked after scrolling down a bit.
My back button isn't hijacked unless I scroll to the end on Firefox Mobile.
Firefox on a mac, totally hijacked my back button.