To say this week has been an odd one is like saying road charging is a bit of a tricky policy ask, airport expansion decisions are not always made with ruthless speed and there is a slight danger you won't find a seat on your commuter train.
At times like these, when some suggest we are living in an era of 'post-truth politics', those of us in transport and infrastructure can draw comfort from the certainties of our sector. But comfort is not enough and engineers have reason to voice concern.
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Spaghetti Junction built by people we hope were experts
The election of Donald Trump, first predicted by The Simpsons, takes the uncertainty of Brexit adds a 'plus, plus, plus', puts it in a Large Hadron Collider, fires it against the many moving particles of an uncertain world and forgets to close the doors. Those who feared the CERN collider might cause a black hole that would destroy planet earth, might now be wondering in hindsight whether fear was really the right emotion.
True, no matter how wrong and ridiculous you might believe building a wall along the southern border of the continental United States is, if said wall is ever completed it will at least obey the laws of physics. It will stand or fall on the basis of common engineering principles. The hard-nosed facts of engineering are a sweet relief indeed from the oscillating furies of the populations that use it.
Raw emotions are impossible to quantify, or reason with, and perhaps that is why few predicted Brexit and Trump. What solace then to be an engineer, where facts are not just sacred but the basis of the things we literally stand on. And this is a sector that spends much of its time despairing anyway. In the longest view, the job is to keep rebuilding sandcastles.
Transport is a hard-nosed, fact-based sector, which is something we all need right now. So we cannot take comfort in comfort, but must speak up and remind the world that, no, it has not had enough of experts. It needs experts to design bridges, it needs experts to keep our infrastructure standing. It was experts who repaired the Forth Bridge and it was experts who designed the Queensferry Crossing.
Every day we are kept alive and protected by experts in myriad different ways.
Transport is a derived demand. So in a manner of speaking is politics. It is a means to build a better world. When people believe that politicians themselves are the problem, and less experience is better than more, there is a crisis by definition. Because the sad truth is, there are very few shortcuts to that better world, as much as we would like to imagine there are.
Many in engineering have often said the sector needs to be better at speaking with the public, at making the emotional case. Ironically, politics now has a similar need - to get better at arguing the facts and to do so in a way that inspires the best emotions in the public.
