Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System

by Wes Marshall

subsidy. Here are some of my favorite least favorite examples of engineer speak. “Safety is a shared responsibility.” When the public tells the engineer that they don’t feel safe crossing the street here or bicycling there, traffic engineers will remind everyone that safety is a shared responsibility or that personal responsibility needs to play a bigger role. In other words, they don’t plan to fix the problems with design changes; they just want everyone to follow the rules we’ve laid out for them. I’ve found versions of this almost as far back as the traffic engineering literature goes. A 1955 paper tells us that “safety is everybody’s problem” and that “if each accepts his individual share of the responsibility, the task [of improving road safety] will be easy.”11 Some of today’s more progressive traffic safety movements use this phrase as well. They want “safety is a shared responsibility” to mean that engineers and policy makers need to share in this responsibility of creating a safe transportation system. Unfortunately, traffic engineers and policy makers continue to co-opt it in a way that shifts blame onto road users. “We need to take a balanced approach.” In many cases, the public wants more space for pedestrians and bicyclists. Or they want the engineer to help slow cars to make streets safer for other modes. The engineer reminds the audience that we need to balance everyone’s needs, which in theory means that we need to find an appropriate balance between things...