Roads by Jack

Honest Wares, Earnest Thoughts, No Toll Required

A Timely New Year’s Resolution

Introduction

Are they holding pretzels?

This week is a regular week like any other week. There is work to be done, kids to be raised, and I still can’t get ahead of my outside chores. Like any other week, my family’s house is filled with great times of laughter, singing, and playing. This week is different, however, than the other 51 weeks in a year. Today, the sun goes down for the last time in 2024. The next time the sun comes up, it will be a new year; no longer 2024 but 2025.

I’m not a sappy or sentimental guy, not in the least, but I do like ceremonial milestones that motivate and stir us up in the right ways. Take Spring for example. You see that all kinds of folk are motivated to work their yards, start gardens, or revive old projects that were run down. I’d like to consider New Year’s Resolutions as hopeful steps and goals that will see fruition as the year goes on. Maybe you can view New Years as more of an anticipation for Spring, where we hope the seeds we plant in the cold winter will yield much in the later seasons. I think I’ll stop here and call the dogs back in before they wander off too far. You get my gist.

A Resolution for You, Oh *Roadway* Engineer

I’d like to encourage you readers who, I suppose, are engineers of the roadway sort. If you are not that, well, I don’t know how you wandered in but I’m glad you’re here. Welcome.

In 2025, strive to get one project under control with some new modern methods. I’ve mentioned a few here on the blog but you can search them yourselves, too. They are:

  1. Read Deep Work by Cal Newport and join me in transforming our industry.
  2. Use the 3D Linear Method on all corridors of a project.
  3. File Federate your project into manageable chunks. If your project is 4 miles long, find intelligent spots to break it in 2 or 3 separate zones.
  4. Read/Use the FHWA ORD Manual alongside your DOT’s manual. It’ll give you a second perspective on workflows.
  5. Use ORD’s Sheet Index as much as you can. Stop trying to man-handle everything manually.
  6. Seek out new ways to improve, replace, or streamline different workflows in your project and team.

Some Resolutions for All Civil Engineers

For those of you who don’t use OpenRoads Designer or are not in the roadway side of things, don’t worry. I have things for you too:

  1. Read Deep Work by Cal Newport and join me in transforming our industry.
  2. Consider replacing that 5-year old Excel spreadsheet with a WebApp equivalent. Your group keeps copying the older version you told them not to use! You need version control!
  3. Learn to use ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilots, Gemeni, and other AIs to help your workflow. No, they can’t design your system and no one is arguing for that. But they can be incredible servants. I used them to make my own Time of Concentration WebApp in a day and it works better than my spreadsheet that took much longer to build.
  4. Spend more time instructing yourself and others with revisiting basic technical concepts, plan reading, plan checking, etc. We as an industry are getting really rusty and are forgetting the basics.
  5. Learn to regularly ask yourself, “Can this be automated?” and, “Can we reduce the number of steps?”

Conclusion

My hope is that in 2025 the industry will begin to adopt more of the elements from the 4th Industrial Revolution: automation, GPTs and LLMs, Machine Learning, Digital Delivery, etc. Our industry takes a very long time in adopting any new tool or method which is why I want to encourage you to hurry up and start learning these things. Individuals can really make a lot of hay at getting ahead of their peers. Companies can handle more volume of work than their competitors with the same amount of people. The whole industry can work a lot less overtime by using modern methods and tools to work harder during their regular business hours.

See you in the New Year!