User:The Duncan

Hi I'm Duncan Campbell, and I have been doing traffic engineering as a trade for the past fifteen years. My qualifications include Masters of Engineering degree with honours (civil)specialising in transport, and I am CPEng registered (Chartered Professional Engineer) and a member of IPENZ (Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand).

You can contact me on duncan.campbell@tes.net.nz.

Traffic engineering is a branch of civil engineering, and basically involves designing and putting in things like road markings, traffic islands, roundabouts, traffic signals, cycle lanes and bus lanes to name but a few. It's actually a really interesting occupation I find, but some of the drawbacks include:

• You have to really live in a decent sized city to do it. If you like living rural you probably shouldn't be a traffic engineer.
• You have to deal with the public and politicians, which can be frustrating at times. As most drive cars themselves, many people think they know how to the job better than you. That's not to say you shouldn't listen to their suggestions, as often they can be right on the mark. If you're not a people person though, traffic engineering would perhaps not be your first career choice.
• There is a strong tendency towards conservative solutions rather than innovative ones - this is mainly driven by risk-averse mentality of engineers in general I think (and perhaps Western society in general), the origins of which are open to speculation. Adoption of new ideas which have a perceived element of risk therefore tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
• Its pretty hard to work as an independent entity and still get involved in interesting design projects.

These last two points are something I thought this wiki concept could be a key to, somehow.

For the past fifteen years I have mostly been tied down to large workplaces where flexibility of location and working hours are for the most part justifiably limited. The reality is that getting a new road design on the ground is a team effort requiring different skill sets and good communication to get a good result and avoid costly mistakes. I don't ever imagine getting away from that completely until my next lifetime in heaven (well, if they have roads up there), but I would like to think that there is a better way in the here and now. For example I think I am pretty good at designing roundabouts and I think my skills could be well utilised elsewhere and not necessarily within the same city or country I reside, or even within the same organisation I work for.

Myself and another traffic engineer have also developed a new type of roundabout which we call the C-Roundabout of which we have recently built several in Waitakere City, Auckland, New Zealand where I currently work as an employee of Waitakere City Council. I would like to think there is more efficient way of sharing information about new ideas like these which can also encourage similar innovation take place. It has taken about five years from concept to construction for our C-Roundabouts, and I just don't have the patience to do it like that all over again for something else - it just seems to be so un-necessary. Maybe a wiki like this is the way forward? We'll see.