Killed by a Traffic Engineer
Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System
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- €6.49
Publisher Description
In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us.
Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets.
In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.
Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Killed by a Traffic Engineer shows how traffic engineering “research” is outdated and unexamined (at its best) and often steered by an industry and culture considering only how to get from point A to B the fastest way possible, to the detriment of safety, quality of life, equality, and planetary health. Marshall examines our need for speed and how traffic engineers disconnected it from safety, the focus on capacity and how it influences design, blaming human error, relying on faulty data, how liability drives reporting, measuring road safety outcomes, and the education (and reeducation) of traffic engineers.
Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets—and traffic engineers— in a new light and inspire you to take action.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American drivers' bad safety record can be attributed to poor street and highway design rather than personal error, according to this incisive debut polemic. Civil engineer Marshall lays out how transportation engineers have "designed and built a system that incites bad behavior and invites crashes" due to their overreliance on standards (e.g., roadway widths) that have little scientific basis. Engineers should instead treat standards as guidelines subject to good engineering judgment, according to Marshall, but he further contends that transportation engineers generally consider safety less important than mobility (i.e., moving vehicles as quickly as possible). Marshall delves into esoteric transportation literature, liberally quoting from standards manuals and research articles to portray—and lampoon—how transportation engineers think. He documents the inadequacy of safety research—which is warped by government funding requirements, the contortions of legal liability, and pressure from the automobile industry—and critiques current design standards, including what he describes as the flawed premise that speed of travel matters more for mobility than access (e.g., off-ramps and cross-streets), a misconception which he says hinders both mobility and safety as it leads to logjams and dangerous maneuvers by drivers. Marshall's breezy narrative, with section titles like "What Are We Doing Here?," plunges surprisingly deeply into the nitty-gritty of engineering standards, giving many specialist terms a vigorous, exasperated working-over. Transit nerds and advocates for safer streets will relish the detailed conceptual battle map drawn here.
