What's Your Transportation Confession?
Photo by Shalone Cason on Unsplash
The new book from Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn will be released in early September. In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Chuck explains why the North American transportation system is getting worse even as it’s costing more. He also explains how to fix it using a Strong Towns approach.
In addition, Chuck looks back to his early days as a traffic engineer, when he designed and built dangerous stroads, and convinced towns and cities to spend more on transportation projects he later realized were unsafe, ineffective, and too expensive. All because they were the industry standard.
Back in 2010, in the early days of Strong Towns, Chuck said that many of those projects had been “utter insanity”:
Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a fourteen-foot lane for a city block, yet we do it continuously. Why?
The answer is utterly shameful: Because that is the standard.
In the weeks leading up to the release of the new book, we want to give engineers, planners, and others a chance to make their transportation “confessions.” Some examples:
Have you worked on transportation projects you knew—or came to know—were too costly in time, safety, and quality of life?
Have you ridiculed or marginalized people who dared to criticize the industry standard approach?
Have you pursued projects without actually talking with or observing the residents who would be most affected by them?
And for the non-professionals: Have you ever gotten, um, creative with the law because your city’s transportation system just wasn’t built with people in mind? This could be anything from jaywalking to tactical urbanism projects designed to #SlowTheCars.
We’d love to hear your stories and will share some of them here. By submitting your story, you agree to let us share—though note that there are ways of submitting your confessions anonymously.
What’s your transportation confession?