What are Smart Cities?

Infrastructure, often intimately connected with civil engineering, provides the backbone and structure that serves various spaces, such as cities or countries. It provides roads and sidewalks for transportation, a water supply for people to drink, sewers to deal with waste, and much more. In the past, infrastructure design and construction has been reactive. It was a response to an event, like a natural disaster, or a local issue such as flooding or fires. Now we are looking for infrastructure to be proactive and work to solve multiple problems with dynamic solutions, like Smart Cities.

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Build Back Better – Part I: Electric Vehicle Incentives

As of November 2021, in the United States the average vehicle transaction price (AVTP), vehicle price before any manufacturer incentives, was $46,329. That was for both gas and electric vehicles (EVs). If one was only looking at EVs, the AVTP was $56,437, a delta of $10,108. However, this doesn’t tell the entire story.

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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act - Part 4

This article is the fourth we’ll be posting, exploring the various areas and sectors the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) bill aims to address through investment and funding. We discuss infrastructure related to electric vehicle charging stations, disaster resiliency and power infrastructure.

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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act - Part 3

This article is the third we’ll be posting, exploring the various areas and sectors the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) bill aims to address through investment and funding. We discuss infrastructure related to airports, waterways, ports, railroads and safe streets.

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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act - Part 2

This article is the second in a series we’ll be posting, exploring the various areas and sectors the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) bill aims to address through investment and funding. The topics addressed in this article focus on parts of the bill meant to help people reconnect with their communities or digitally connect through high-speed internet access. It also discusses some funding dedicated to improving the environment, and the public health benefits those changes could have.

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The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act - Part 1

Politics and civil engineering aren’t usually brought up in the same sentence, but it’s happening more often with the new, roughly $1.2 trillion dollar bill that advanced in the US Senate last Wednesday, July 28th, 2021. The bi-partisan bill, formally known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), includes significant funding for various types of infrastructure nationwide. If it passes, it will be the largest addition of federal money into the public works system in over 10 years. This would impact cities and states across the country, as well as the people living in those communities, and a variety of businesses and industries, like civil engineering.

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Building Accessible Infrastructure for Everyone

Steve Krug once said “The one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?” Throughout our lives our physical and mental abilities change as we age, making ability more of a spectrum than a binary concept as we once thought. By keeping this in mind as we build infrastructure, we can make infrastructure more accessible to all people regardless of where they are on the ability-spectrum.

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Transportation Infrastructure

Infrastructure has certainly been a buzzword recently, but what does it actually mean? How does it affect our everyday lives? Why is it always in the news?

The term infrastructure describes the various physical and organizational systems and facilities we need to operate as a society, such as the energy grid, our system of interconnecting roads, public transportation and much more. Good infrastructure is critical for a city, organization, country, etc. to function properly and be competitive in the global marketplace.

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