Why Traffic Engineering is in Civil Engineering? 2

[Sazirul]

Few days ago there was a job circular in my country that employer want a person from Civil Engineering Background to design a traffic map. So, traffic engineering is included in Civil Engineering? Please don't make me wrong, I want to know about it.

Thanks

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[IRstuff]

As you may have noticed, the forum to which you posted is in under Civil Engineering. Given that CEs have purview over roads and their design, traffic engineering would seem to be an obvious adjunct.

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[fel3]

It takes a dedicated team of civil engineers to screw up a road network and bless society with weird intersection geometries, bad sightlines, closely spaced and badly timed signals, traffic jams, and such. No other engineering discipline knows how to do it.

Seriously, though, IRstuff is correct. My undergraduate civil program included a required, introductory transportation course called "Transportation Planning and Design" and additional elective courses in specific areas of the subject, such as pavement design, traffic operations and control, road and highway geometric design, etc. Since my interests were hydraulics and structures, I only took the intro course. It was taught by the father of a high school classmate. He was a good teacher, but even he couldn't make a boring subject interesting.

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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
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[bridgebuster]

It's not only true in the US. In the book, "The Road to Little Dribbling" by Bill Bryson, he raises the same point about the UK. He said, "...if you really want to screw up traffic leave it to a highway engineer...".

On a more serious note, some engineering field has to claim traffic engineers, might as well be Civil. I took two traffic course in college and highway engineering it was useful. Over the years I've come to the opinion that traffic engineers are way too conservative and they can never have enough traffic counts.

 

[ACtrafficengr]

Historically, there were originally two main branches of engineering military engineering, which included troop mobility, counter-mobility, fortifications, breaching fortifications, etc., and civil engineering, which included pretty much everything else except perhaps naval architecture. Over time, some fields became distinct enough to become their own disciplines.

When Hamlet said,

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard

he used military engineering as a metaphor. It means blowing someone up with their own demolition charge.