The beauty of being a mechanical engineer is that they are involved in all aspects of engineering and problem solving; engineering and problem solving are integral parts of most public service industries. That being said, mechanical engineers can be found holding all kinds of job titles and working in a huge variety of industries.
Boston boasts being a youthful city full of innovation because of all the colleges and universities that it hosts. However, Boston is also one of the oldest cities in the country and has an extremely dated and inefficient transportation system to go along with it. Services like uber and hubway are extremely popular because of how difficult it is to travel via train within the city. Even Uber and biking pose their own challenges because traffic can be debilitating and biking among Boston drivers can be dangerous. Despite Boston being relatively small, it can take unreasonably long for people to commute to work and school because of the outdated MBTA system and the mess of roads and traffic inside the city limits. Aside from being an inconvenience, poor transportation systems also contribute to safety concerns (especially in the winter) and the huge influx of people who try to live inside the city because it’s too difficult to commute from somewhere else.
Although transportation and infrastructure are issues typically handled by civil engineering/consulting companies, it is an issue that needs more hands on deck. Tackling this problem will take lots of financial and practical planning that would involve several types of engineers. Reorganization of the transportation system and updates made to the MBTA could massively improve the state of things, but as a mechanical engineer, I wonder if the implementation of an entirely new transportation system would be a more effective fix? What alternatives could exist to make traveling in Boston less of a problem?
