Ethical issues in engineering design - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and ...

Design of a bridge
Figure 6.1a and b: Bridge for pedestrians and cyclists in Maastricht. People
climb on the arch and sometimes try to walk to the other side using the arch
[photos A. van Gorp].
Other possibly dangerous activities connected to bridges are diving from a
bridge, committing suicide and throwing things down onto ships passing under
a bridge. No attention was paid to preventing this in the preliminary design
phase. There is no legislation that requires bridge designers to install measures
to prevent people from throwing things down or from diving of a bridge. In the
Netherlands it is forbidden to dive from bridges but no measures have to be put
in place to prevent people from doing this. The engineers indicated in the
discussion after my presentation that they did take care to design in such a way
that things such as a crucial bolt, which might be unscrewed, and if undone
would then influence a bridge’s stability, was not accessible. This was not
mentioned explicitly in the design process. The engineers wondered what other
misuse should be prevented and whose responsibility it was to take such
prevention into account. There are no norms or codes for this.
The issue of misuse was not discussed in the preliminary design phase. The
design leader said that they had decided that some measures to prevent access to
certain parts of the bridge would be taken in the definite design phase. The
design leader also indicated that he expected feedback from the Rijkswaterstaat
on this issue when they sent the design to the Rijkswaterstaat for a check of the
design. According to the design leader the Rijkswaterstaat Civil Engineering
Division had a lot of experience with designing large bridges and they probably
had ideas about what types of misuse to prevent and how to prevent it. The
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