Transportation Engineering

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Transport engineering has always been one of the essential civil engineering disciplines, impacting roadways, bridges, transit stations, airports and sea ports etc. Transport engineering has now developed into a multidisciplinary field spanning economics, politics, sociology and psychology, in addition to its core mathematical, engineering and computational principles.

Basically it concerned with moving people and goods efficiently, safely, and in a manner conducive to a vibrant community. This involves specifying, designing, constructing, and maintaining transportation infrastructure which includes streets, canals, highways, rail systems, airports, ports, and mass transit. It includes areas such as transportation design, transportation planning, traffic engineering, some aspects of urban engineering, queueing  theory, pavement engineering, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), and infrastructure management.

Duties of a Transportation Engineer.

Transportation engineers have various duties based on specific job levels. We need a broad range of continually evolving, large-scale transport infrastructure, including road, rail, air and water. Transport engineers quantify and optimise our mobility infrastructure networks to meet travel and freight demands, while ensuring safety, equity and sustainability, at minimal levels of congestion and cost .Engineers must be able to evaluate plans and proposals drafted by other engineers and make changes if necessary. Other common duties include analysis of schematics and engineering data, offering recommendations for traffic and driving policies, designing transit means and analyzing the effects of transit on urban areas. In addition, transportation engineers may oversee plans with contractors and calculate the overall costs for a project.

Education Requirements.

Most entry-level jobs in transportation engineering require a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. Some schools offer transportation engineering as an undergraduate degree focus or concentration. An accredited bachelor's degree program in civil or transportation engineering may last 4-6 years. Coursework often includes calculus, physics, chemistry, solid-fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, as well as professional studies in traffic control, optimization and environmental issues.

Many Transport Engineers go on to obtain their master's degree, which can be helpful for obtaining higher paying management positions.