I have been involved with the Senior Design Project program at Pitt’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department for the past three decades in varying roles, including coordinating it for twenty years. Since retirement I have kept in touch with the program by serving as a mentor for a succession of teams. This week I watched this term’s six teams give their final presentations.
A team of transportation students was given a significant challenge by the Allegheny County Engineering Department – to evaluate the feasibility of replacing problem intersections with roundabouts, and to identify several good candidates for such replacement. They were given a shortlist of six intersections, which they eventually narrowed down to two candidates – a simple “tee” intersection in Fox Chapel, and an extremely complicated five-way intersection in Enlow, North Fayette Township. An additional complication to the Enlow roundabout is the fact that the Montour Trail parallels two of its legs and crosses a third. The team did a good job of coming up with a design that significantly minimizes potential vehicle conflicts while maximizing the ease of traversing the roundabout. They presented an impressive simulation of existing problems of traffic inter-acting in the existing intersection; a simulation of it moving through the roundabout they designed would have been constructive.
A second transportation team also had an interesting challenge – to improve the function of Forbes Avenue in Oakland as a “stroad”. According to urban planner Charles Marohn, a stroad is part street and part road, an artery trying to serve two competing functions and usually failing in at least one. Examples would be Washington Avenue in Bridgeville, and Beverly and Washington Roads in Mt. Lebanon, busy business districts with local pedestrian and vehicular traffic competing with a large volume of through traffic. Already one-way, Forbes Avenue will be further complicated by the addition of a dedicated BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) lane on the southeast side. The team’s solution to improving its function as an urban street is to eliminate parking on the northwest side, widen the sidewalk to accommodate pedestrians, and move all unloading zones to side streets. The team also presented simulations demonstrating how “intelligent” control of the traffic lights can expedite the passage of through traffic.
The third team to present was the one for which I was a mentor. Their assignment was to design a portion of the proposed Turtle Creek Connector Trail, a recreational trail linking Allegheny County’s extensive Three Rivers Heritage Trail network with the Westmoreland (County) Heritage Trail, which runs east from Trafford to Saltsburg. The team’s portion was a stretch of two miles between Pitcairn and the Westmoreland trail head in Trafford. It included a section following an old Pennsylvania Railroad roadbed, a section through undeveloped land, and an on-road “shareway” section on Broadway Avenue in Pitcairn. My specific interest was the design of a new bridge spanning fifty feet to replace a badly deteriorated railroad bridge. The students exhibited an excellent ability to utilize powerful technology to design a relatively simple bridge, coupled with an absence of any effort to optimize their design in an effort to reduce cost. The team’s insistence on maintaining a width of ten feet everywhere for a lightly travelled trail is another explanation of why construction of government-financed recreational trails is so expensive these days.
The fourth team had a much more complicated bridge to design – a 340’ long, four span continuous access ramp to the Rankin Bridge, replacing a badly deteriorated structure. This team also utilized the latest design/analytical technology quite capably. It was interesting to me to compare their process for analyzing a continuous four span structure with the manual methods we used when I was a designer, long before the advent of high speed electronic computers. These students are far more efficient than we were, but they lack the understanding of how structures transfer loads that our methods generated, and thus the judgment needed to optimize them. Or, am I just out of step? At any rate, I was quite impressed with the work on this project.
The other two projects were identified as “environmental engineering” as contrasted with the first four “civil engineering” projects. The distinction turned out to be more semantical than characteristic. The first project was the conversion of a large (100 acres) fly ash disposal pile at the Homer City generating station into a properly maintained landfill. Their design included capping the pile with a combination of clay and geotextiles, and installing an impervious wall and monitoring wells to isolate it from the ground water table. Ironically, the first Senior Design project I observed, in 1993, was a hypothetical landfill. Again, it is interesting to see how technology has changed in three decades. This team did a highly professional job implementing their project.
I was also quite interested in the final project and properly impressed with the team’s work on it. This was the design of a plant to treat abandoned mine drainage using an active process similar to the one recently installed in Cecil Township to clean up Millers Run. The team quite logically explained each step in the process and the reason for selecting and sizing each piece of equipment. We have done a number of projects dealing with abandoned mine drainage in the past, always using a passive process, like the one at Wingfield Pines near the Upper St. Clair Township recreation complex. The passive process is more environmentally friendly, but requires a much larger area than the active one. I’d like to borrow this team to tackle our problem on McLaughlin Run in Bridgeville.
The six projects in total are an impressive demonstration of the current students’ readiness to take the next step in their careers as entry-level engineers. Their mastery of contemporary technology, their ability to communicate orally and graphically, and their sincere concern about the environment make a combination that bodes well for the future for all of us.