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.

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.

Or a large pole with seven cables from its tip were installed at the vertex, making the project a literal suspension bridge.

Sometimes we are paid to say “no”.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Government bureaucracies are rather far from "capitalism".

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.

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"

I am at a loss with all of the “well they were forced into it” comments. Don’t build it.

"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.

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.

Given that its India, I struggle to imagine any movement about 10mph

It's like a level of Super Sprint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Sprint#/media/File:ARC_S...).

Yes, Interstate 90 in Cleveland. It is still there, and still a large number of crashes.

Can confirm - it’s colloquially known as “dead man’s curve”, just east of the heart of the city.

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)

My back button isn't hijacked unless I scroll to the end on Firefox Mobile.

Firefox on a mac, totally hijacked my back button.

Firefox mobile, I only get hijacked after scrolling down a bit.

Why? Cars can easily make a 90 turn. It happens at almost every intersection

... 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.

I immediately thought about the innumerable versions of this comic: https://imgflip.com/i/4uhwsx

I agree! I only used it in this bridge context.

AP Stylebook says "avoid alphabet soup."

Good writers refrain from unnecessary acronyms (I refer to plain language rules, or "plr").

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.

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.

#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.

You must be in a left hand drive country?

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.

Shame only the first installment of the series had an expansion pack set in London.