I was wondering the other day if
there are any traffic engineers or transportation planners that are considered
famous. And when I say famous I mean well known among the general public and
not only among our profession and scientific community. While I tried really
hard to think of someone, no one came to mind and I felt a little embarrassed as
if I hadn’t done my homework properly. But then I asked the same question in
two different relative LinkedIn groups. And while there was some name dropping
none of these could really qualify as being famous or well known. Actually I
doubt that if I asked 10 different colleagues about those names if I would get even
one recognized unanimously.
Even the fictional ones are not that
famous.
When trying to find people that are
famous for other reasons but who still come from a traffic/transport
engineering background, the only name that came up was that of the Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who apparently at some point in his life studied civil/traffic engineering.
So why is it that although world has
some famous architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van de Rohe, Frank Gehry or
Zaha Hadid just to name a few, doesn’t have famous traffic engineers? Why do we
have famous economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx. John Keynes or Milton Friedman and we don’t know of any transport planners?
And if for doctors it is
quite reasonable to know so many because of all these diseases named after them why is it that we don’t know who designed the first tram system? Or the
inventor of Bus Rapid Transit? Why the bridges aren’t named after their
designer?
Actually this last part may not be
absolutely true as in Brisbane we have the Walter Taylor Bridge designed and constructed by WalterTaylor who was an engineer and builder.
 |
| Source:State Library of Queensland and John Oxley Library |
