Do me a favor. Please skim through this issue and read the headlines. Nothing else. Flip through and come back. Or, if you are reading online, go to the issue’s main page and read them there.
I’ll wait.
You’re back? You never left, and I should get to the point? Excellent!
This is our Awards Issue: our annual list of the year’s Top 10 Roads and Top 10 Bridges. The headlines signal why these projects made their respective list, and themes emerge if you pay attention.
Design, team, unique, reconstruction, rehabilitate and congestion — these words characterize why the projects in this issue needed to be launched or what made them significant.
(I know this because I made a word cloud of the headlines. This is the first word cloud I have ever made. I created it because I didn’t know how to approach this column, so now I think I’m clever.)
Let’s examine the words that define our awards issue, starting with design. This is pretty obvious, but to standout in this industry, a stellar design team is crucial. That’s why the country’s best engineering firms are represented on our lists.
Team is next, and in each submission, even the ones that unfortantely did not make the list, teamwork was attributed to success. It sounds so simple, but if you have ever worked a job where the team didn’t gel, then you know that I’m probably understating its importance.
When you combine a great team with quality design, you have a recipe for a unique project. But, as you will read in this issue, creative design wasn’t the only factor that made a project unique.
For many projects, how technology was employed made their submissions shine. Innovation played such a crucial role for determining these lists that we plan on inviting representatives from some of the winners on the Infrastructure Technology Podcast.
My apologies for the shameless plug of our podcast with Mass Transit Magazine, which launches in January.
The final three words that epitomize our winners — reconstruction, rehabilitate and congestion — speak to the problems that were addressed. This also provides us with a snapshot of the industry.
Urban and suburban areas face overcrowding. These parts of our country have aging infrastructure that wasn’t meant to withstand this amount of growth. In some cases, the roads and bridges were already crumbling.
The same six words might dominate our next awards issue. That’s the industry in a nutshell: The most talented engineers in the country, project teams filled with hard-working, humble and dedicated role players, using technology that would have seemed impossible in 1980, trying to fix a deteriorating infrastructure that was largely ignored until recently.
I hope this country doesn’t stop investing in its infrastructure. And I hope you have a great end to 2024 and a wonderful start to 2025 — thank you for reading! RB
