Welcome & an introduction

Welcome to this blog, whose title in Italian roughly translates the English phrase "road megaprojects." I'm a graduate student in economic history at the University of Oxford, and one of my main leisure interests is collecting construction plans for road projects. Despite my university affiliation, I am American, and the US remains my main focus for collecting since its volume of road construction has historically been extremely high, and its contracting culture is both open and technologically advanced--a combination which is almost, but not quite, unique.

I am carrying out this blog partly as an experiment. In the years I have been collecting construction plans, I have seen enormous variation in how major projects are phased. In some states a major project can be let as a single contract valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, so anyone who gets hold of the plans for it therefore has the perfect bird's-eye view of the work being done. In others it can be broken down into literally dozens of smaller contracts, which are advertised over a period of time, so it becomes much harder to see how the work in one contract relates to the coherent whole. I have also found that I tend to miss some contracts since my approach toward trawling electronic plans tends to skip contracts which may be part of a major project but don't have any signing content (the history and practice of traffic signing is another of my interests).

Blogs, it occurred to me a while ago, are the perfect medium for following large projects which have been broken down into smaller units of work. Posts can be categorized according to the major projects to which they correspond. Posts can also be linked to each other. The medium itself is ideal for recording information as it comes to light. The research required to prepare a blog post can also turn up information I would have missed otherwise--for instance, I didn't discover Indiana DOT contract 29153 (the bridge replacement I mentioned in the post just finished) until I started digging deep for a post which I had initially thought would be about contract 29137 (construction of mainline I-465) only.

At the same time, I have long been suspicious of blogs, since I have felt (even before the ongoing backlash against blogging in general) that the medium furnishes too ready a platform for egotistical foolishness. There is also the problem of archiving (when we maintain blogs, are we writing on water?), and perhaps most crippling of all, finding new material for blog posts. My native country, frankly, is road-obsessed, so I don't think I will run out of new material; instead I suspect time and energy will become the ruling constraints. I am also not writing this blog for comments or attention, though it would certainly be nice if people who found it useful would write in and say so, and possibly even point out corrections to the errors I will no doubt make.
Nor will I pretend to give a comprehensive treatment of the subject--if this blog grows at all, it will do so organically. To give it ample opportunity to die a quiet death, if it should eventually fail to hold my interest, I propose not to promote it in a public forum until it has accumulated at least thirty posts over a period of sixty days.