Concrete rubble is also salvageable on the job site. Recycling would require transporting to a mill, crushing, separating, transporting to a furnace, and then the process described in the article starts.

There are legal routes for public agencies to purchase portions of land to create routes for transportation, including pedestrian paths, that ensure you're at least paid for the lost property. If there is a need, then lobbying your mayor or council is the way to go about this. That's a lot less risky than letting anyone enter your property anytime for any reason as long as they say they're on a nature walk or something.

Some of the wisdom from programming would do well to pass onto design software. Like how strong type systems can provide safety by pushing rules to compile time and make some errors unrepresentable. Meanwhile, I can fire up Microstation, draw roads crossing at the same elevation with no intersection (think stops and signals, not geometry) between them. Or a drain culvert could terminate in a big Hello Kitty picture. These things should be impossible. If the task is designing a road, I don't need the ability to draw anything I can possibly imagine. I really need the software to know what a road can and can't do, produce a model that obeys those constraints, and to give me files and documents I can give to an owner and a contractor which convey an accurate understanding of what that model is.

Does parasolid not fit this requirement? The capabilities I've seen in Plasticity are very impressive. Or do you specifically mean FOSS?

The more I use CAD platforms, the more I develop the sense that general-purpose CAD is much less useful than single-purpose applications that provide tailored solutions to narrow problem domains. SVG/DXF/DWG output is a plus, but I think a drawing software that works for high-volume machine parts, one-of-a-kind architecture, highways, 50-mile pipelines, circuits, urban transit plans, and art is the wrong direction. I use industry standard roadway design software and a "road" does not exist in the object model. Horizontal, vertical, and sectional components are all independently defined despite these things being inseparable and having some very obvious and well-specified rules about their interaction. I really think designers should spend more time thinking about outcomes and less time telling the computer how to display them.

They're not real or nobody drives.

Personally, I would love to deliver more projects. The vast majority of my time is spent on mind-numbing drudgery that makes the job extremely unsatisfying. If someone offered me a job where I got to focus on the fun parts of my work, and I didn't have to dump the drudgery on a poor intern (the AI does it), but at half my pay, I'd resign the same day.

I hope the net result will be a shift toward upskilling employees to achieve the expertise handle the difficult edge cases and less time spent on the routine or the trivial. Seems like a win-win. Incentive structures might make this hard.

You've discovered a market with unmet needs!

Perhaps I missed a zero somewhere, but 5MAF/yr would require pumping 6,900cfs of water to/from the gulf with 230+ft of head. We're going to need a bigger boat.

Can't? Don't sell yourself short.

Keep in mind, though, you don't lose a lane of traffic. There is no need to truck in jersey barriers. You don't have to build an entire temporary detour road. You don't pay a consultant $200/hr to design a traffic control plan.

I think the real value is safety. The crew is shielded by the bridge and you have complete grade separation from traffic. That's a lot better than an orange barrel being the only thing between you and a minivan.

If anything the article may more likely be an indicator of the delta between crime as-is and as-reported or a cautionary tale of decision-driven-data

For software enabling a $150B industry, you would think it would at least run reliably. That there aren't objects that are aware that they are roads (just lines, arcs, and spirals) makes it laughably bad. The cost of this waste is tragic.