Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the course of the authors career as a Transportation Design Engineer he has had the great privilege of participating in a wide variety of design projects, two of which book-end his career. The first, Whitemud Drive, was designed over a number of years and completed in the late 80’s by a small design team where the author participated as a Geometric Design Engineer. The second, the Highway 63 / Highway 686, Parsons Interchange, was completed in 2013 in a relatively short period of time by a much larger team where he participated as the Project Coordinator. Whitemud Drive is an urban freeway extending approximately 27 kilometres across the south side of Edmonton from Anthony Henday West to Anthony Henday East. The author was an active participant as the design engineer for the easterly 18.5 kilometres extending from the North Saskatchewan River to Highway 14, now renamed Anthony Henday East. The design components included nine diamond interchanges, two flyovers, one major stream crossing and one railway grade separation. The Highway 63 / Highway 686, Parsons Interchange is a rural systems interchange that in its ultimate configuration will include approximately 7.5 kilometres of highway, seven bridge structures and a myriad of associated ramps. As Project Coordinator the author was responsible for managing a design team that included in-house designers and several subconsultant specialists. This paper discusses the processes that were involved then and now in completing the designs of the two projects including the design tools and drafting processes (including tools and techniques); It will look at the methodologies used in the calculation of tender quantities and the preparation of cost estimates and will discuss the advances made in design software; it will compare the end result of the two design processes and lastly it will present the authors opinion on the sacrifices that have resulted from these advances including a lost understanding of the basic geometric functions that are key to geometric design and quantity calculation and the potential loss of the understanding of basic design principles that form the basis of the TAC Geometric Design Manual.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".