I find it sad that this might kill McCain's campaign, when it is one of the few true statements he has made. The fundamentals of our economy are strong. The housing market got way out of whack, and now a market self-correction is occurring. The only thing that is wrong with this is that the government is over-stepping its bounds and taking over companies as if to pull a domino out of a line of falling dominoes.
Given that TAE called for the immediate resignation of Hank Paulson on Monday, I thought it would be fitting if I made this resignation week and called for another.
TAE calls for the resignation of Deb Miller, Kansas Secretary of Transportation. Of course, I do this mostly out of personal spite. Today I drove on a poor excuse for a road, and as the oncoming traffic was throwing gravel onto my car (this road was paved yesterday?) I couldn't help but feel a little chagrined.
Anyway, in the great state of Kansas, where roads are touted as some of the best in the nation (because there's no traffic, perhaps?) and intersections are up for awards, I find it ironic that the KDOT ran out of funding. Apparently making huge, ridiculous, inefficient (but pretty) intersections that feature wildflowers, giant sideways towers to hold traffic lights, and 11 lanes of traffic is expensive. That honestly doesn't matter, especially if you are a civil engineer.
Mechanical engineers such as TAE, have nothing but derision for civil engineers, which are considered near the bottom of the engineering totem pole, second only to industrial engineers in their general lack of advanced engineering methods. As a general rule, the smaller the object the engineer is working on, the more respect the engineer has. Electrical engineers designing computer processors? Geniuses. Civil engineers surveying where to put a pond on a farm? Not geniuses.
Anyway, Deb Miller, KDOT Sec. who ran the state out of road-building money, is not an engineer. In fact, Deb got her degree in sociology (a natural fit in the engineering world) and subsequently went to HNTB (an architecture/engineering firm) where "she provided strategic planning and public communication assistance to state Departments of Transportation and municipalities" so she wasn't an engineer or an architect, she was a P.R. hack whose job most likely was to explain to state DOT's that HNTB needed to increase their budget on bridge projects in order to qualify for awards.
And of course, after her four years at HNTB she moved to the public sector and in no time at all (literally zero time) she was Director of the Division of Planning and Development, a position she held for 10 years. Governer Sebelius promoted her to the SecTrans position in 2003.
Anyway, no where can I find any information that leads me to believe that Ms. Miller (as she's called on the website) has had any formal engineering or financial training that would give her valuable knowledge in how to build roads cheaply, or how to spend the fiscal budget over 12 months on projects that make sense.
My real beef here is that a driver gets off the highway at US 69 Hwy, 87th St, and I-35 and you find yourself in a complex, gigantic intersection where nothing looks right. At one point in the intersection, a tunnel has been made that leads off the highway into a field. Future expansion I guess? Other features of the intersection include sculptures of bison, brown-eyed susans (sunflowers on a budget) that block your vision of on-coming traffic, stones with tall-grass "imprinted" into it, and pedestrian walkways with fences composed of prairie grass wrought iron cutouts and small towers with color changing lights. All in all the intersection has the workings of a theme park attraction, with a myriad of distractions to see that drivers will only enjoy if they are stuck in the intersection at a red light. Which is actually pretty commonplace. Apparently, no where in the America's Transportation Award criteria must traffic actually move through the intersection.
But Deb Miller isn't the only buffoon at KDOT. The state of Kansas seems to take pleasure in building mega-intersections with cloverleafs hacked through limestone rock as though dynamite and bull-dozers lay waiting to be used, as if we prefer to swing at 0.7 G's around corners like a kid on a swing rather than making a simple left turn and accelerating straight down a hill and merging onto the highway.
Cloverleaf intersections, I contend, are specifically made so that a civil engineer can take aerial photos of it and put them in his resume to convince future city councilpersons that they aren't an offensive waste of money. I can imagine the selling pitch: "Look at this, here's an intersection we did in Gardner, Kansas. Not only can you get on northbound I-35 by taking the cloverleaf, you can also take the normal on-ramp! That's right, we built two on-ramps to the same direction of traffic at a quiet intersection with less than 5,000 cars daily! Now we at Johnny Civil Engineering Firm can do the same for your intersection here in Olathe."
KDOT sceptic: So what do you propose for the Lone Elm and I-35 intersection?
Civil Engineer: We specialize in shutting down lanes of major interstate highways for months or years in order to knock out perfectly good bridges and replace them into art bridges. We propose taking out the existing bridge in 2007, diverting traffic on I-35 from 2007-2009, putting in cloverleaf interchanges with no traffic lights in 2009, putting in a new three layer bridge in 2010, adding traffic lights in 2011, repaving the bridge in 2012..."
KDOT sceptic: Well what if our mega-bridge starts to flatten out and lose it's bow like the one at 151st and I-35? We've spent almost 12 million dollars trying to fix it, and it continues to worsen.
Civil Engineer: That was a different firm, my firm would never have done that.
Minor word of defense for Deb Miller: part of the reason Kansas is out of money is because the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, 2007. Since then, the entire pad of KDOT's funding has been spent inspecting, repairing, and shoring up as many existing bridges as possible. That said, the obscene new bridges over I-35 at 127th and 87th streets, as well as the new bridge over US-69 at 131st st. are poignant examples of wasteful, non-utilitatarian spending.
They are bridges for cripes sake, they don't need to be pretty!
Mechanical engineers such as TAE, have nothing but derision for civil engineers, which are considered near the bottom of the engineering totem pole, second only to industrial engineers in their general lack of advanced engineering methods. As a general rule, the smaller the object the engineer is working on, the more respect the engineer has. Electrical engineers designing computer processors? Geniuses. Civil engineers surveying where to put a pond on a farm? Not geniuses.
Anyway, Deb Miller, KDOT Sec. who ran the state out of road-building money, is not an engineer. In fact, Deb got her degree in sociology (a natural fit in the engineering world) and subsequently went to HNTB (an architecture/engineering firm) where "she provided strategic planning and public communication assistance to state Departments of Transportation and municipalities" so she wasn't an engineer or an architect, she was a P.R. hack whose job most likely was to explain to state DOT's that HNTB needed to increase their budget on bridge projects in order to qualify for awards.
And of course, after her four years at HNTB she moved to the public sector and in no time at all (literally zero time) she was Director of the Division of Planning and Development, a position she held for 10 years. Governer Sebelius promoted her to the SecTrans position in 2003.
Anyway, no where can I find any information that leads me to believe that Ms. Miller (as she's called on the website) has had any formal engineering or financial training that would give her valuable knowledge in how to build roads cheaply, or how to spend the fiscal budget over 12 months on projects that make sense.
My real beef here is that a driver gets off the highway at US 69 Hwy, 87th St, and I-35 and you find yourself in a complex, gigantic intersection where nothing looks right. At one point in the intersection, a tunnel has been made that leads off the highway into a field. Future expansion I guess? Other features of the intersection include sculptures of bison, brown-eyed susans (sunflowers on a budget) that block your vision of on-coming traffic, stones with tall-grass "imprinted" into it, and pedestrian walkways with fences composed of prairie grass wrought iron cutouts and small towers with color changing lights. All in all the intersection has the workings of a theme park attraction, with a myriad of distractions to see that drivers will only enjoy if they are stuck in the intersection at a red light. Which is actually pretty commonplace. Apparently, no where in the America's Transportation Award criteria must traffic actually move through the intersection.
But Deb Miller isn't the only buffoon at KDOT. The state of Kansas seems to take pleasure in building mega-intersections with cloverleafs hacked through limestone rock as though dynamite and bull-dozers lay waiting to be used, as if we prefer to swing at 0.7 G's around corners like a kid on a swing rather than making a simple left turn and accelerating straight down a hill and merging onto the highway.
Cloverleaf intersections, I contend, are specifically made so that a civil engineer can take aerial photos of it and put them in his resume to convince future city councilpersons that they aren't an offensive waste of money. I can imagine the selling pitch: "Look at this, here's an intersection we did in Gardner, Kansas. Not only can you get on northbound I-35 by taking the cloverleaf, you can also take the normal on-ramp! That's right, we built two on-ramps to the same direction of traffic at a quiet intersection with less than 5,000 cars daily! Now we at Johnny Civil Engineering Firm can do the same for your intersection here in Olathe."
KDOT sceptic: So what do you propose for the Lone Elm and I-35 intersection?
Civil Engineer: We specialize in shutting down lanes of major interstate highways for months or years in order to knock out perfectly good bridges and replace them into art bridges. We propose taking out the existing bridge in 2007, diverting traffic on I-35 from 2007-2009, putting in cloverleaf interchanges with no traffic lights in 2009, putting in a new three layer bridge in 2010, adding traffic lights in 2011, repaving the bridge in 2012..."
KDOT sceptic: Well what if our mega-bridge starts to flatten out and lose it's bow like the one at 151st and I-35? We've spent almost 12 million dollars trying to fix it, and it continues to worsen.
Civil Engineer: That was a different firm, my firm would never have done that.
Minor word of defense for Deb Miller: part of the reason Kansas is out of money is because the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, 2007. Since then, the entire pad of KDOT's funding has been spent inspecting, repairing, and shoring up as many existing bridges as possible. That said, the obscene new bridges over I-35 at 127th and 87th streets, as well as the new bridge over US-69 at 131st st. are poignant examples of wasteful, non-utilitatarian spending.
They are bridges for cripes sake, they don't need to be pretty!
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