Transportation Engineers

A few months ago, I was standing on the side of the road waiting for the right moment to cross to the other side where my house is. Next to me were three girls, and close by were four other girls, and then after about a minute two women showed up, bringing our total to 10 people, and of course we all wanted to cross the road. Unfortunately, there was no pedestrian crossing or traffic signal to alert cars to stop, so we had to force the cars speeding by to stop ourselves. Suddenly one of the girls shouted, "Let's hold hands and move together so we look like one big group and the cars notice us." Sadly, none of them held my hand — I just walked alongside them — but the important thing is the mission succeeded. Just imagine all that just to cross the street, not to save someone or do something heroic. But don't be surprised — if you live in a crowded city packed with people and cars like the one I live in, it might take you far longer than it should just to cross the street, and you could even lose your life over that decision. Do you know what a city like this — or any similar city anywhere in the world — actually needs? Just good planning and people with the expertise to know what cities should look like. It needs experts specialized in planning roads, streets, residential areas, and shops, who know exactly where crosswalks and traffic lights and all the other things people can't live without should go. Those tasks fall to specialists called "transportation engineers" — they're the ones responsible for the infrastructure related to roads, streets, and bridges in any city, tasked with planning roads in the best possible way to help reduce accidents and make people's lives easier. The transportation engineer is also the one who handles the planning of railways, airports, and ports that millions of people pass through every day, without which there would be no commercial activity or movement of the goods people need everywhere in the world. So the better and more precisely these things are planned and built, the more positively it reflects on every aspect of life, because that means fewer accidents, greater safety for people, faster and more efficient movement of goods, and lower costs.

Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa