The England Bypass - an Ontological Approach

I see that Mr. johnson, following up his triumph in delivering an imaginary bridge in London, is proposing a more ambitious imaginary bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. A sort of bypass for England. Apparently this is something to help keep the Union together, and since this is the only idea he has for the wider Union he will want to keep the consultation on this going for as long as he needs the distraction, or at any rate for as long as there is a Union.

The great thing about imaginary stuff like this is that all the money is spent on consultants. As a consultant, this naturally got me thinking.

Now I am not a chartered surveyor or a civil engineer or anything like that. I am an ontologist. My first reaction to this idea was that since ontology is the study of what there is, there was not a lot of call for an ontologist for something whose sole purpose is not to be built.

That's not strictly true of course, since there are different schools of thought in ontology. The 'Realist' school says you can only create an ontology of things that exist in the real world, whereas the 'Conceptualist' school allows for ontology based representations of things that do not exist, including those that might never exist - a vital requirement for risk modelling, for example. But this is getting too serious for what started as a couple of my usual drive-by postings in social media.

I thought about it some more and realised that an ontology based contribution to the bridge project would indeed be valuable.

First we start with a couple of existing constraints: the pontoons can't be built all the way to the sea bed as this is further than such things have ever been built. And even if they could, there is unexploded ordnance down there so you would end wishing they hadn't.

To address this you would need floating pontoons. And if you have floating pontoons you don't need twenty miles of them since you can float them back and forth; you only need one or two, maybe three at most. Then you only need the little bit of roadway between them.

For further efficiency you can arrange the pontoons in parallel with the roadway on top of them and maybe a little bit of retractable roadway at either end.

The bridge would need some big engines at one or both ends to move it back and forth.

Then there is the matter of pedestrians. If it were possible to have static pontoons, would pedestrians be expected to walk the entire twenty miles across the bridge? What happens during bad weather events, when the potential costs of rescuing them as they blow off or get swept out to sea becomes prohibitive?

With the floating pontoons solution, pedestrians would not be walking anyway, so you would add some superstructure in the form of a dry place for them to shelter from the weather. This might have seats, maybe even a bar. Some windows of course.

Further cost savings are possible. You don't need retractable roadway at both ends since the moving pontoons make it possible to turn the whole bridge by 180 degrees - so I just halved the cost again right there.

So there you have it - an ontological solution to the bridge problem. You might choose to call it something else, but that's a terminology question, nothing to do with ontology. I have simply defined what its characteristics are; the characteristics that are the best fit for the engineering problem as stated.

Now where do I send the bill? I think the going rate based on the Garden Bridge is something like 53 million per quarter mile.