road standards
One of the big things engineers are doing here is working with the Afghan engineers to make specifications for everything. In the US there's the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). These two describe anything you could ever imagine about highways, roads, stoplights, signs...everything and more. There's no standards right now and many different countries are building tons of roads here...we're trying to set up standards to make everything the same. Do we set up the Afghan roads so they're like the US, or more like European, British and Japanese roads? US roads are much wider than European and Japanese roads. Do we want wide luxurious lanes...or skinny lanes? What do we want stop signs to look like?...yield signs, goat crossing, school ahead, landmines on the side of the road, bridge ahead, speed limits?...the list goes on and on.
There's also the road themselves...what should we spec out for contractors to build? When you usually build a road, you predict the traffic flow in a few years and design for that...but it's a little harder to predict stuff like that because things are changing so fast here...new towns are popping up, cities are growing...so traffic flows around the country are changing all the time. How do you predict the percentage of trucks to cars? The gross axle loads of each? The daily numbers of cars and trucks traveling? The average tire pressure? Their honest velocities...not what we post on the speed limits. How would we enforce the axle loads? There's no weigh stations...so should we design for a whole lot more? All this costs money, Afghanistan does not have the GNP of the US...how will they be able to pay for the maintenance of these roads?
Then you got Tanks...those things are super heavy and their tracks tear up roads, few if any US roads and bridges are designed for them, but most of the bridges here were originally designed for T-60s...an old Soviet tank. This place has a whole lotta tanks. Jingletrucks are really heavy too...how to describe a jingletruck...take the biggest non-articulating truck you can find, load it up so the frame of the truck almost touches the ground, and throw on some colorful beads and paint it with psychedelic colors and patterns. We can design a road for them, but they cost so much more because they need to be way structurally stronger...so we can either build a section of 4 lane divided highway just like the highway in the US, or we can build a 2 lane nondivided highway that can support tanks and jingletrucks.
There are also lots of tunnels here too, one is bigger than the Eisenhower tunnel in Colorado, and 70% of the gas used in Kabul goes through that tunnel. It's so strategic that the Northern Alliance blew up the entrances to keep the Taliban from getting supplies. Well, after fixing the tunnel, literally tons and tons of goods are flowing through it daily.
Roads, tunnels and bridges are soooo important; you can't have trade, commerce or growth without them. (Anyone play SimCity, Civilization or any other game like that?)The roads here really sucked 2 years ago, in many places the highways and roads degraded to where the road was completely gone and people were driving on the subgrade...potholes were so bad you couldn't drive more than 15 miles an hour. But now, major highway projects linking most of the major cities are either complete or in their final stages. A drive that used to take 3 days can now be done if a few hours. The magnitude of this work is on the scale of the US highway projects in the 1950s. Too bad the media doesn't care...but the Afghani's love it. The military and Corp of Engineers does the engineering for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and USAID has listed some of the big infrastructure projects their site.
So...we have lots of questions, and making more questions is easy, finding solutions that makes everyone happy is impossible, finding an ideal solution is...ideal
I'm not even gonna get started on Airfields, runways, and heliports...but I heard we're not allowed to fly on HIND's (old russian helicopter gunships) anymore. They were really cool because they look tough and also because you could spit at the ground through holes in the floor while it was flying...you'd always laugh, "what a piece of crap" while flying in it. Safer is definitely less fun.
There's also the road themselves...what should we spec out for contractors to build? When you usually build a road, you predict the traffic flow in a few years and design for that...but it's a little harder to predict stuff like that because things are changing so fast here...new towns are popping up, cities are growing...so traffic flows around the country are changing all the time. How do you predict the percentage of trucks to cars? The gross axle loads of each? The daily numbers of cars and trucks traveling? The average tire pressure? Their honest velocities...not what we post on the speed limits. How would we enforce the axle loads? There's no weigh stations...so should we design for a whole lot more? All this costs money, Afghanistan does not have the GNP of the US...how will they be able to pay for the maintenance of these roads?
Then you got Tanks...those things are super heavy and their tracks tear up roads, few if any US roads and bridges are designed for them, but most of the bridges here were originally designed for T-60s...an old Soviet tank. This place has a whole lotta tanks. Jingletrucks are really heavy too...how to describe a jingletruck...take the biggest non-articulating truck you can find, load it up so the frame of the truck almost touches the ground, and throw on some colorful beads and paint it with psychedelic colors and patterns. We can design a road for them, but they cost so much more because they need to be way structurally stronger...so we can either build a section of 4 lane divided highway just like the highway in the US, or we can build a 2 lane nondivided highway that can support tanks and jingletrucks.
There are also lots of tunnels here too, one is bigger than the Eisenhower tunnel in Colorado, and 70% of the gas used in Kabul goes through that tunnel. It's so strategic that the Northern Alliance blew up the entrances to keep the Taliban from getting supplies. Well, after fixing the tunnel, literally tons and tons of goods are flowing through it daily.
Roads, tunnels and bridges are soooo important; you can't have trade, commerce or growth without them. (Anyone play SimCity, Civilization or any other game like that?)The roads here really sucked 2 years ago, in many places the highways and roads degraded to where the road was completely gone and people were driving on the subgrade...potholes were so bad you couldn't drive more than 15 miles an hour. But now, major highway projects linking most of the major cities are either complete or in their final stages. A drive that used to take 3 days can now be done if a few hours. The magnitude of this work is on the scale of the US highway projects in the 1950s. Too bad the media doesn't care...but the Afghani's love it. The military and Corp of Engineers does the engineering for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and USAID has listed some of the big infrastructure projects their site.
So...we have lots of questions, and making more questions is easy, finding solutions that makes everyone happy is impossible, finding an ideal solution is...ideal
I'm not even gonna get started on Airfields, runways, and heliports...but I heard we're not allowed to fly on HIND's (old russian helicopter gunships) anymore. They were really cool because they look tough and also because you could spit at the ground through holes in the floor while it was flying...you'd always laugh, "what a piece of crap" while flying in it. Safer is definitely less fun.
posted by Mike at
5:40 AM
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