The daughter of a bridge engineer in Iowa, Avery Bang spent a lot of her childhood accompanying her father on bridge inspections—"even on holidays," she recalls. Now, Bang builds bridges in developing countries around the world.Bang's globe-trotting tendencies started in college, where she earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Iowa.
Contractors recall how Don Hillis, assistant chief engineer for the Missouri Dept. of Transportation, often would point to a big sign he had installed in a meeting room.
Related Links: For Panamax Port Expansions, The Freight Wait is Almost Over Taking Asphalt's Temperature From automated vehicles to infrared bars that check for uniform temperatures in paved asphalt, the transportation industry is embracing high-tech tools and concepts. The current two-year federal legislation called MAP-21 promotes many such initiatives, including enhanced intelligent construction data, to help builders and operators achieve greater efficiency, reliability and safety in moving people and goods.MAP-21 also includes an emphasis on improved freight networks—a watershed inclusion that inspired multiple sessions at the Transportation Research Board's 92nd annual meeting on Jan. 13-17. The sessions consistently featured representatives
Photo Courtesy of the MTA Storm barriers are just one of dozens of suggestions in a draft report after Sandy. Photo Courtesy of the MTA Related Links: Gov. Cuomo Announces Appointments to Emergency Preparedness Commission Draft of the NYS 2100 Commission Report Pressurized Tunnel Plug Claims to be Affordable Alternative to Permanent Floodgates Storm Surge Switches Grid To Off A draft report commissioned by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in response to Superstorm Sandy reads like a catalogue of every wish list item on every infrastructure advocate's agenda—from flood-specific recommendations for building storm surge barriers around New York to
Rail grade separations. Revamped locks and dams. Toll roads and bridges. Dredging. These components are some of the most "'glamorous parts of the infrastructure conversation in the U.S.," says Pierce Homer, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association's ports-and-waterways co-chairman and Moffatt & Nichol's transportation director.
Walsh Group, Chicago, appears to be the big winner—leading one design-build team and part of a public-private partnership (P3)—in bids for two new, 2,500-ft-long cable-stayed bridges across the Ohio River in Kentucky and Indiana.
Superstorm Sandy has been the media star of the past month. But the documentary mission of New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority videographer J.P. Chan is to highlight Sandy's responders at the agency—those crews pumping out water, checking signal systems and bringing transit back to a dependent city as quickly as possible.