TRANSPORT ENGINEERING OVERVIEW 
      Transportation has always played  an essential role in the development of society, 
      originally with regard to trade routes and harbours, but more recently with regard to 
      land and air-based systems.  
      It is the transportation engineer's responsibility to:(PDBOM) 
       •  Plan 
       •  Design 
       •  Build 
       •  Operate 
       •  Maintain  
      Transport  systems in such a way as to provide for the safe, efficient and convenient 
      movement of people and goods. 
      Increasing environmental concerns have revived an interest in the development and 
      management of public transportation systems.  
       
      Professional activities can range from road and transit design and operation at the 
      urban scale, to railroad, seaway and airport location, construction and operation at the 
      regional and national scale. Transportation engineering in certain  countries  focuses on 
      automobile infrastructures, although it also encompasses sea, air and rail systems. 
      Automobile/Vehicle infrastructures can be split into the traditional area of: 
       •  Highway design and planning 
       •  Traffic control systems. 
       The transportation engineer faces the challenge of developing both network links and 
      major terminals to satisfy transportation demands, with due regard for proper land use 
      and  land-use, environmental impacts.   
      TRANSPORT ENGINEERING AND  TRANSPORT MANAGEMENT 
      Transport engineering has always been one of the essential civil engineering disciplines, 
      impacting roadways, bridges, transit stations, airports and sea ports etc.  
      Transport engineering has now developed into a multidisciplinary field including 
      economics, politics, sociology and psychology, in addition to its core mathematical, 
      engineering and computational principles. 
      We need a broad range of continually evolving, large-scale transport infrastructure, 
      including road, rail, air and water. Transport engineers quantify and optimise our 
      mobility infrastructure networks to meet travel and freight demands, while ensuring 
      safety, and sustainability, at minimal levels of congestion and cost. 
      Transport engineers plan, design and operate the large public and private infrastructure 
      systems that connect our physical world. 
      TRANSPORT PLANNING 
      Transport planning involves developing mathematical techniques for: 
       •  forecasting travel demand and planning to accommodate growth in demand 
       •  determining improvements to the transport infrastructure 
       •  reducing emissions 
       •  reducing energy use. 
      Computational transport planning uses mathematical methods to predict, represent and 
      quantify: 
       •  the evolution of land use in cities 
       •  travel attributes such as trip purpose 
       •  travel decisions, including mode choice. 
      Planning models then examine the feasibility of projects and policies through cost-benefit 
      and scenario analysis. 
      TRANSPORT  DESIGN 
      Transport engineers make design decisions when they are designing optimised transport 
      infrastructure networks. These might relate to: 
       •  the physical expansion of transport facilities, such as lane width or the number of 
        lanes, for a roadway 
       •  the materials and thickness used in pavements 
       •  facility, such as a roadway, rail line or airport 
       •  road pricing schemes 
       •  deploying information-based technology. 
      In all design decisions, multiple performance measures, cost implications  and safety 
      criteria must be carefully considered. 
       
      TRANSPORT OPERATIONS 
      Transport operations, whether for road, rail, port or air traffic, are designed to: 
       •  minimise travel delays 
       •   improve safety 
       •   reduce emissions  
       •   enhance reliability  
      Transport operation decisions involve: 
       •  optimising traffic signals 
       •  setting specific tolls 
       •  designing traffic signs and markings. 
      With the development of new Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), transport 
      engineers use tools including advanced traveller information systems, advanced traffic 
      control systems (such as ramp meters) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to 
      optimise the performance of the transport system.