In 1982, with my newly acquired Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering, I joined the traffic team of an engineer’s department in a London borough.
The other teams in the department were highways, drainage and town centre. Town centre existed to plan and design a major pedestrianisation scheme, in the town centre. Drainage existed mainly on the strength of an agency agreement with Thames Water. The work of the highways team was the pre-planning and detail design of highway improvements, and it handled the borough’s structures stock.
After 12 months learning traffic engineering the borough engineer told me he was going to rotate me to the maintenance team, where, he said, I would get the chance to build some of the traffic schemes I’d designed. Now I’m getting to the point of my introduction – moving to maintenance meant moving department; highway maintenance was not a responsibility of the borough engineer.
Wembley stadium, nothing like a pothole? Think again
What I am trying to illustrate is the status that maintenance enjoyed back then. When I arrived at the depot I found a pretty dedicated, and knowledgeable, bunch of inspectors and technicians, doing a pretty good job keeping the fabric of the borough’s streets together. No need for any lah-di-da university types – well maybe one, borrowed from the borough engineer.
It turned out that I preferred being a maintenance engineer to being a traffic engineer – nothing to do with the tea pot that was refreshed every time an inspector or technician came back from site. I kept my head down hoping that the borough engineer might forget where I was; it worked for two years, then he called me back to the Guildhall to join the highways team. The call of the wild of the depot was in me though and I found a way to return – I’ve made a living in highway maintenance ever since.
I liked the immediacy, the quick turnaround: a problem identified a solution designed and remedial works actioned. Here I get to my central point of this piece – every maintenance intervention requires a design element. In my presentation on network management that I have given a couple of times I compare repairing a pothole with building the new Wembley Stadium.
Both scenarios start with a piece of defective infrastructure, and both the old stadium and the pothole got to the top of the remedial action list. From this point your basic civil engineering procedure applies to both, that is:
· need identified
· outline solution
· detailed design
· procure contractor
· instruct contractor
· works
· check and measure
· check invoice and authorise payment
· warranty period
I’m not going to labour this comparison – but you get my point. The detail design stage is not optional. OK, if you’ve got to deal with several potholes in a short space of time you might go on some sort of “menu” approach, but this has its risks – not all potholes are the same. I have postulated that all potholes can be categorised by their cause, but that’s for another day.
One of the key issues to consider when detailing the repair of a pothole, or any maintenance intervention, is the design life of the repair. There is nothing necessarily wrong with a short design life, aka a temporary repair, if that is what the designer requires, and he/she, or someone, has another plan for that piece of infrastructure before that design life expires.
How many highway authorities today have their own materials person? Staying with the black stuff: HRA or SMA or TSCS? I’m normally 100% rigid on not using acronyms or initialisms without expanding them on first use, but here I’m going to make an exception – if you have any involvement in pavement maintenance and you don’t know what these initials stand for I suggest you’re in the wrong job. If you’re not in highway maintenance and I’ve whetted your interest, I suggest you fire up your preferred search engine – and you can learn what the differences are between an SMA and a TSCS.
It's a premise in all branches of science that you need to achieve a certain level of understanding of a subject area before you know what are the right questions to ask; and then you have to know who to ask. For example, if you want to know how much asphalt you should be laying I suggest you be wary of asking someone whose job it is to sell asphalt.
Of course you don’t need to have university degree to be an effective highway maintenance engineer – you do need to have an enquiring mind, a logical approach to problem solving and an ability to read. Thanks to that wonderful thing the Portable Document Format you don’t even need metres of bookshelf.
There are great learning resources at everyone’s fingertips these days. Just some in the field of highway asset management and highway network management have come out of HMEP (Highways Maintenance Efficiency Programme) – you really do need to read all of these.
Another way of acquiring the knowledge you need is to commune with fellow practitioners and this where organisations like TAG come in. TAG is the Local Government Technical Advisors Group www.lgtag.com, and it encourages membership from all, public and private sectors, with an interest in not only our highway assets but the greater transport, environment and public space issues of this great nation.
This nation’s highway infrastructure is its most valuable asset; it deserves the nation’s best brains to look after it.
Trevor Collett, junior vice president at the Technical Advisers Group and technical director at Mouchel.