Madeleen Engelbrecht, Associate Director at Arup in transport planning, announced the objectives as the newly elected chair of the Transportation Division of the South African Institute of Civil Engineers’ (SAICE), at its recent award ceremony.

Engelbrecht, who served two years as vice-chair in 2012/2013, indicated that three goals would be to attract more transport professionals into the industry, enhance the knowledge base and improve the technical expertise in the industry and connect with members to provide a service.

“The association has initiated an ‘Outreach programme’ at universities and is working with the SAICE student chapters to include talks on transport as a career or to encourage an interest in post-graduate programmes in transport. We will also be talking to universities to understand their curricula and how we can have more under-graduate transport subjects,” explains Engelbrecht.
 
“We are working on more inspirational prizes for best paper awards, such as sponsoring attendance of international conferences. This is supported by events such as the awards functions, where we recognise the contribution of professionals and celebrate their successes. 

“We aim to further the art and science of technology of transportation engineering and enhance industry knowledge base. This part of our programme is focussed on courses and over the next 12 months we plan courses on:
• Universal access design
• Refresher course on the highway capacity manual
• Transit capacity and quality of service manual

“We have already had a successful transport session at the Civilution congress, which took place in April 2014.

“Finally, to connect with our 1,300 transportation members, who make up 11% of SAICE, we are relaunching our website. It is still work in progress but we have an on-line presence again and we are going to update the contents monthly. We plan to supplement the website by adding social media channels such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

“We will have the Durban luncheon in October 2014 and the Cape Town luncheon in November 2014.  We are planning to send out a short questionnaire to our members to understand their needs and interests better and arrange other suitable events. We look forward to an exciting year in transportation,” concludes Engelbrecht.

Engelbrecht, who has been with the Arup group since 2001, has B.Eng (Stellenbosch) B.Eng Hons Transportation (Pretoria) and has been a professional registered civil engineer with ECSA since 1998. She is currently studying ‘Programme in Management Development’ at GIBS.

She was selected for the Arup Jack Zunz Leadership Programme in Malaysia in 2008 and won an award from Women in Engineering and the Built Environment (UJ & Group 5) for Excellence in Engineering & Technology at company level. She has presented papers at conferences and has been nominated for the ‘Transport Personality of the Year’ at the Africa Rail 2014 Conference.