User:The Duncan

Hi I'm Duncan Campbell, and I have been doing traffic engineering as a trade for the past fifteen years. 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.
• You have to deal with the public all the time, which can be both satisfying as well as frustrating. Many people think they know how to the job better than you.
• You have to deal with stroppy politicians.
• 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.
• Its pretty hard to work as an independant entity and still get involved in interesting design projects.

This last point is something I thought this wiki stuff could be a key to, somehow. For the past fifteen years I have mostly been tied down to large workplaces where basically, you sometimes have to toe the line in certain ways to earthly masters even when you don't feel like it. I don't ever imagine getting away from that completely until my next lifetime in heaven, 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. That's not to say that every roundabout I've put in is a great roundabout, but I have learnt a fair bit along the way and I think my skills could be well utilised elsewhere.