John Milne
Design Engineer, Clark County Public Works
Clark County, WA
Mr. John Milne, PE, Design Engineer for Clark County Public Works, Washington, has been selected to travel to Australia. His tour will focus on how Australian cities are incorporating environmental and economic sustainability strategies within their land use planning and capital infrastructure programs, while also taking early steps to bring driverless car and Smart City technology into their cities and public infrastructure.
“Climate change is making our sustainability needs more immediate,” said Mr. Milne. “It’s clear that we can no longer push ‘externalities’, such as ozone levels, to the back of the queue in our planning. Calls for public works agencies to ‘do more with less’ are not going away, and so we need to find even more efficient ways to help manage our resources. When bringing exciting new technologies, like ‘smart infrastructure’ and driverless cars, into our cities, we need to be careful that their implementation actually adds to the quality of all our lives, with no ‘unintended consequences’.”
Mr. Milne will visit Engineering and Planning Departments in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, to assess how those cities are dealing with sustainability and climate resilience in their planning and public infrastructure. Adelaide is building two separated bikeway routes, giving its citizens good commuter and recreational access throughout the city. Melbourne’s ongoing smart city development is “adopting useful innovation that folds seamlessly into how we live our lives to improve our day-to-day experiences”. Sydney’s Community Strategic Plan is moving them steadily towards achieving a “green, global and connected city” by 2030. American engineers can learn much from Australian and New Zealand expertise and experiences with those initiatives. “Just as the Wallabies and All Blacks can teach us a thing or two about rugby, our mates down under can also provide many other examples of innovative strategies and practices that can help us greatly in the mutual quest for a sustainable economy and environment,” he said.
Mr. Milne will also attend the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) Conference in Adelaide from August 15-18, 2021, where he will present Part 2 of “Sustainability? Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Negative Entropy”, a technical paper outlining the “entropy-based resource management” organizing principle for the development of sustainability strategies.
Mr. Milne holds a BSc. In Civil Engineering from Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, a MS in Water Resource Engineering from the University of Colorado, and is a registered PE in Washington State. He has over 40 years of experience in civil and water resources engineering in Great Britain and the United States.