Engineering for Dummies anyone?

 Interesting article in the Gazette this morning related to Montreal's crumbling infrastructure. Most Montrealers are nervous about driving on  a bridge and even more so in underpasses and tunnels, especially after pieces of concrete have fallen off.  The thing is that those in the government seem to think that we're all idiots and so they don't make available the report on Montreal's infrastructure. Right now they are saying they are simplifying the report to make it more accessible to people, that people aren't all engineers. 

While it is true that people are not all engineers, I happen to know that Quebec does have a high number of engineers. According to another Gazette article there's 60,540 engineers in Quebec alone and 390,000 Canada wide.  I personally think there's enough of the population with engineering backgrounds to be able to understand such "complicated" reports.  I personally think they aren't releasing the reports to the public because we will realize that many more of our roads, bridges, underpasses and tunnels are disasters waiting to happen. That our municipal and provincial governments have been neglecting infrastructures for years and they want to hide their incompetence.

Completely unrelated to Montreal's infrastructure, I blog a lot about Syria and I'm sure some of my friends wonder what is so different about Syria. I've even read comments on various of the stories coming out of Syria and people say "Wait till the next elections and choose someone else". Kind of hard to chose someone else when Syria has Russian style elections, where only 1 person presents himself on the ballot.  I found an interesting blog here that explains more the politics of Syria and what Bashar Al-Assad has done since coming to power in Syria in 2000, after his father's death. Funny that they could change the constitution in a heart beat to allow the then too young Bashar to become the leader of his country, but any change to the constitution demanded by the people would take months and years to accomplish.

Crumbling infrastructure

Some of my fellow Quebecois seem to think we have the worst infrastructure in the world. I think people exaggerate. Admittedly when concrete slabs fall on highways it makes all of us nervous. It gives me more reason to take the train downtown. The last chunk of cement who fell was in the Ville Marie tunnel downtown Sunday morning.  Thankfully no one was hurt.

I think the crumbling infrastructure is also a Canadian problem and probably a north American problem.  Our governments built highways, tunnel and bridges 50-60 years ago when we had a 10th of the volume of traffic. I don't think we ever expected the sheer volume of cars on the road that we're seeing today.

It doesn't help either that some of the construction companies around Montreal and/or Quebec were suspected of being mobbed up.  This means that while the projects were completed, many were completed with inferior materials and many corners were cut so as much money as possible was pocketed.  This is presumably why the Quebecois think we have the worst infrastructure. But I'm sure we're not the only ones with this problem either.