Civil Engineers Must Love Driving
I was wearing my engineering thinking cap today more than normal. So I decided to go out for a drive from Downtown Los Angeles up the coast on Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu and came back and ended up randomly on Mullholland Highway. Throughout this late night drive to clear my mind I stumbled onto some new observations. First why did anyone really bother to create all of these windy twisty roads snaking up and down the mountains the way they do? And second why is this always my favorite drive I have ever done in all of California?
I kept thinking to myself we all know that Mullholland Highway was known for famous actors racing around the amazing twists and turns late night. But why did this road even get built? Without mentioning any of the history, I think that some smart Civil Engineer decided to play with the topography and created what they thought was an awesome road to drive on. There is no other reason as these roads could be much smoother and have less amazing turns and still follow the mountainside just the same. I am convinced that Civil Engineers are the ones, this car obsessed state need to thank.
The sad part of this, is that there has been some awful repaving done on Mullholland toward Calabasas. So bad in fact that driving the speed limit in my car would be dangerous for a majority of the road, its that bad. And noticing that the road is recently paved makes me cringe. So someone higher up doesn’t want people driving these roads. Could this possibly be the home owners no wanting cars in their backyard and hogging up all of the beautiful landscape California has to offer?
So where does this lead us? Civil Engineering design standards on paper have come a long way to make the roads more dull and safe to drive on, but current building standard are so bad that newly repaved roads are more dangerous.
