Hume Fellowship

Recipients of Hume Fellowships in 2005

Steve Abley

One of two Fellowships awarded in 2005 went to Steve Abley, age 34, a consultant traffic and transportation engineer based in Christchurch who graduated from Canterbury University in 1996 with BE (Hons).  In 2006 Steve is the Chairman of IPENZ Canterbury Branch and a member of IPENZ Board.  He has worked in traffic and transportation engineering for the last 14 years including five years in London where he co-authored the design manual “Designing Living Streets” produced by the Living Streets charity which campaigns in UK for better streets and public spaces.  The manual placed emphasis on walking as a vital means of transport.

The Hume Fellowship enabled Steve to travel to 8 countries and 13 cities, speaking with the world’s leading transport professionals on sustainable transport.  The objective of the award was to enable Steve to influence NZ transport planning professionals with overseas best practice.  His journey included Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Lima, Bogota, Boulder, Portland, Amsterdam, Delft, Houten, Drachten, London, Singapore and Perth.

On his travels Steve observed mainstream sustainable transport modes, including walking and cycling.  Steve summarised his trip as a dichotomy of major differences that exist in transport planning policies, that sustainable transport can be accepted, safe, cheap, healthy and fun, and within a fairly short plane trip it can also be perceived as unacceptable, unsafe, expensive and not fun.  Not everything he saw overseas was applicable in New Zealand although often a city’s improvement from a very low base is a case study in decision-making and the strength of an individual leader.  Steve found every city visited had something to offer in terms of how NZ could improve.

Merrick Taylor

Merrick Taylor, age 27, who was also awarded a Hume Fellowship is 2005, has a BE (Hons), BSc in Geology and a Post Graduate Diploma in Engineering Geology.  He worked at Beca Carter Hollings and Ferner as a Geotechnical engineer for four years where he was involved in a wide range of projects involving geotechnical and engineering designs. He proposed a 12-month study at Imperial College London  for an MSc degree in soil mechanics and engineering seismology.

In July 2006 he was working on his dissertation, tentatively titled "Performance Based Design of Gravity Retaining Walls under Seismic Loading.", in which he will be comparing methods of analysing gravity retaining structures under seismic loading particularly with regard to predicting movements (tilting & sliding). It will include a literature review, and an analysis of a selected case study, using various simplified methods from the literature, as well as a full finite element analysis using ICFEP (the Imperial College Finite Element Program, developed at Imperial by Prof. Dave Potts specifically for analysing geotechnical problems). ICFEP which has been used extensively in the past for static analysis, has only recently been developed for dynamic loading, so to a certain extent, Merrick's using it will help them to validate the programming work they have been doing.