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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Wes Marshall
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June 11, 2024 - February 14, 2025
urban freeways and street widenings boasts that Detroit’s efforts will not only “eliminate slums” but also “prevent the formation of future ones.” Slums weren’t the only problem
Moses liked to say that he located his freeways using sophisticated equations that kept getting more and more sophisticated each year. But math didn’t have much to
100 percent of dead pedestrians can’t tell their side of the story.
sharrows are worse than nothing. Without accounting for dooring crashes, a 2013 study from Toronto found that streets with sharrows had a higher risk of injury for bicyclists than streets without.
Why can’t we have data like that? To start with, it would be a pain in the neck to collect. But the bigger hurdle is liability. For fear of discipline or prosecution,
Dubner lays out the best way to murder someone and get away with it. He says that he’d “wait ’til they were outside, walking down the street, maybe crossing at the light, and then I’d run them over in my car.
A lawyer who used to prosecute organized crime wrote a 1968 Traffic Quarterly paper complaining that there is less justice in transportation than organized crime.
In a 2003 Transportation Quarterly paper about traffic calming, Reid Ewing lays out the four steps.
The first step is to document your problem.
The next step is to consider your options.
The third step is to pilot and test the intervention.
The last step is to follow up and evaluate the intervention.
research suggests, at least in the medical world, that saying “I’m sorry”—and doing it well—makes people much less likely to sue.
“proactive full disclosure” policy, seven years of data suggested “that an honest and forthright risk management policy that puts the patient’s interests first may be relatively inexpensive because it allows avoidance of lawsuit preparation, litigation, court judgments, and settlements at trial.”
worked? They found that it “diminishes the anger and desire for revenge that often motivate . . . litigation.”
88 percent of headlines made no mention of a driver.
we give more attention—and rights—to cows in the street than we do pedestrians.
If I’m driving and hit a cow, I’m at fault. If I hit a pedestrian, the pedestrian is.
compared to drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are holding water guns.
If you are driver in the Netherlands, the best way to protect yourself from liability is to do your darndest to make sure that you don’t hit any pedestrians or bicyclists.
Most of our standards are more what you’d call guidelines than actual standards.
We take it for granted that those who came before us did their homework and found us a safe solution. But dig into many of the design criteria that we use today—like the side friction factor or perception-reaction time—and you’ll see that we were flying by the seat of our pants.
“In the absence of relevant factual knowledge, professionals have to resort to the waving of manuals.”
For my students, there was enough design flexibility to re-create the basic dimensions and design characteristics of the charming street in almost every case.
give pedestrians a Barnes Dance, and you end up with five times fewer turning crashes.12 Later research suggests a 29 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes.
We could develop guidelines that compel safer streets. Instead, it’s standard practice to use the existing guidelines to shield ourselves and our work from scrutiny.
more than three-fourths of civil engineers start off with only what they learned as an undergraduate. Combine that undergraduate education with whatever they learn from our guidebooks or on the job from other engineers, and that’s the extent of it for most traffic engineers.
fixing things will require “openness, transparency and candour throughout the system.” His thinking was that “duty of candour” should be a legal requirement akin to “duty of care.”
‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’”
So what is engineering judgment, and how do I get some?
It doesn’t matter if you got your license prior to the first Apple Macintosh computer, whatever engineering judgment you amassed along the way must be good enough. How does that make any sense without a feedback loop?
Most transportation engineering graduate programs still play gatekeeper, only letting in those with enough civil engineering credentials in their backgrounds. But we need more students with the chance to be a generalist
despite the abundant kinetic energy—and safety risk—of heavy trucks, we typically assume one large truck to be equivalent to two passenger cars.
Civil engineers typically do not receive any training in the kind of research method needed in road safety, nor do they graduate with much factual knowledge about road safety. Furthermore, nothing in routine engineering practice helps to relieve them of this innocence.”
You need to see how hard it is to pay fares . . . and travel in bad weather . . . and how it feels when your bus doesn’t show up . . . and how it feels when your bus doesn’t show up in bad weather. You also need to watch and talk to other people about their experiences.
agencies approach Vision Zero, and it’s traffic engineering business as usual under a new slogan.
If we truly saw Vision Zero as the moral underpinning of transportation design, basing our approach on scientific evidence and physics, we’d design spongey cars that can’t go more than 20 mph.
How do traffic engineers accommodate walking and biking? Well, the first problem is that word accommodate. We don’t design for these modes; we accommodate them by giving up whatever’s left over after we design for those in cars.
The problematic traffic engineers see the science as settled. They continue to blindly do what we’ve always done despite empirical data telling us that something isn’t right.
We’ve done some things right, but traffic engineering remains a discipline stuck in its dark age. We’ve got work to do to reach our age of enlightenment, and we need your help.
even if you aren’t a traffic engineer, this call to action means you too. Show us our blind spots. Call us out on our engineer speak. Make sure we see the bigger picture.
