Traffic engineering (transportation)

Traffic engineering is a branch of civil engineering that uses engineering techniques to achieve the safe and efficient movement of people and goods.It focuses mainly on research and construction of the immobile infrastructure necessary for this movement, such as roads, railway tracks, bridges, traffic signs and traffic lights.

Increasingly however, instead of building additional infrastructure, dynamic elements are also introduced into road traffic management.

These use sensors to measure traffic flows and automatic, interconnected guidance systems (for example traffic signs which open a lane in different directions depending on the time of day) to manage traffic especially in peak hours. The relationship between lane flow (Q) (vehicles per hour) maximum speed (V) (kilometers per hour) and density (K) (vehicles per kilometer) is Q = KV.

Observation on limited access facilities suggests that up to a maximum flow, speed does not decline while density increases, but above a critical threshold, increased density reduces speed, and beyond a further threshold, increased density reduces flow as well..

Civil engineering

In modern usage, civil engineering is a broad field of engineering that deals with the planning, construction, and maintenance of fixed structures, or public works, as they are related to earth, water, or civilization and their processes.

Most civil engineering today deals with power plants, bridges, roads, railways, structures, water supply, irrigation, environmental, sewer, flood control, transportation, telecommunications and traffic.

In essence, civil engineering may be regarded as the profession that makes the world a more agreeable place in which to live. Engineering has developed from observations of the ways natural and constructed systems react and from the development of empirical equations that provide bases for design.

Civil engineering is the broadest of the engineering fields, partly because it is the oldest of all engineering fields.

In fact, engineering was once divided into only two fields, military and civil.

Civil engineering is still an umbrella term, comprised of many related specialities..

Road-traffic safety

Road-traffic safety aims to reduce the harm (deaths, injuries, and property damage) resulting from crashes of road vehicles traveling on public roads.

Harm from road-traffic crashes is greater than that from all other transportation modes (air, sea, space, off-terrain, etc.) combined..

Transport

Transport or transportation is the movement of people, goods, signals and information.

The field of transport has several aspects: loosely they can be divided into a triad of infrastructure, vehicles, and operations..

Fluid dynamics

Fluid dynamics is the subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that studies fluids (liquids and gases) in motion.

The discipline has a number of subdisciplines, including aerodynamics (the study of gases) and hydrodynamics (the study of liquids)..

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