Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

The zoning codes wouldn't allow this old stuff to be rebuilt here again anyway. And for good reason.

This is a decision that must be made by an elected body — one directly accountable to the people of the community. It should never be made by technical professionals.

We discipline ourselves to work in the smallest increment possible.

They are not stuck in traffic; they are traffic.

Our streets are platforms for building wealth. Traffic congestion is the catalyst for that wealth creation. Congestion is not our enemy; it is our ally.

I am either moving at the legal speed or I am not moving at all. Most people accept this as a necessary tradeoff, albeit annoying. I find it maddening.

A city without traffic signals is a city where most of us arrive at our destinations sooner and all of us travel safer.

Traffic signals are used to create traffic congestion so that there can be gaps in the traffic flow.

Traffic signals are the most mindless and wasteful thing Americans routinely install to manage traffic. Removing nearly all of them within cities would improve our transportation systems and overall quality of life.

Prud'homme and Lee make it clear, in numerous places, that this paper is anything but a definitive study.

Within a city, transit was not about connecting places across distances but in building wealth within a place.

We need to stop asking law enforcement to compensate for our negligent approach to design.

Engineers and transportation professionals are supposed to think, to use their professional judgment, in places where it is warranted.