We Need a New Conventional Wisdom About Streets

My friend and colleague Chuck Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer is finally hitting stores this week! I've been waiting for this book for a long time. I say this even though, as a Strong Towns staffer, I've known just about everything that's in it for years. If you're a longtime reader of this site, you know a lot of it, too—but you've never seen it packaged quite like this. You're in for a treat. 

I sincerely hope everybody reads Confessions. But especially people who are not engineers or planners or any sort of technical city-building professional. Here's why.

In the Grip of a Discredited Ideology 

I've had the feeling for years now that we're at a peculiar tipping point as a society in how we design and think about our public streets. I just hope things tip the right way.

Our city planning and transportation bureaucracies have for decades been in the grip of a bankrupt ideology that refuses to even recognize itself as an ideology. If I could describe this ideology in a few bullet points:

• Streets are for moving motor vehicle traffic. Other users can be accommodated but must be kept out of the way of that traffic.

• The performance of a street should be measured in how quickly and efficiently it moves motorized traffic.

• A safe street is one designed to forgive drivers' mistakes, even if they're inattentive or speeding.

• Congestion is to be avoided. To avoid it, it's better to err on the side of too much road capacity rather than too little.

• The main job of transportation planners is to predict and manage traffic flows.

This ideology once promised a world of almost unlimited freedom and mobility. People would enjoy more elbow room than ever before in human history, and would travel in comfort and luxury to anywhere they needed to go.

This ideology has failed to deliver on its promises. It's been failing for a long time. Far from delivering modern prosperity to cities, urban freeways left devastated neighborhoods, pollution, and blight in their shadows. The arms race with congestion has proved unwinnable; the traffic is bad and getting worse is a truth so universally believed that it makes a reliable subject for small talk just about anywhere in the country. 

Transportation is getting worse and costing more. The buses don't go where you need to go, or as often as you need to go there. Headlines alternately recount the ever-growing infrastructure maintenance backlog and the epidemic of carnage on our roads: as many deaths from cars each year as from firearms, and a rapidly increasing share of them happening to people who walk.

We need something new. This isn't working.

Image via Unsplash.

What Comes Next?

But there's a pivotal point in the failure of every paradigm. It comes when it has lost legitimacy and has a shrinking number of stalwart defenders. But no replacement paradigm has arrived on the main stage yet. There's no alternative set of widely-accepted narratives and facts to make sense of how the world ought to work.

In this void, zombie ideas continue to drive decision-making, simply through inertia and a lack of political consensus around alternative approaches. This is the world in which a deadly road gets reconstructed somewhere every day with an even wider, deadlier design, not because anyone soberly concluded it was necessary, but because the money was there and so was "the standard" in a book on a shelf at City Hall.

We need a better common knowledge that is accepted not just by professionals, but by the public and the elected officials who represent them.

An uncomfortable little secret we don't talk about all that much here: public sentiment is now, in many (though far from all) cases, the biggest obstacle to getting safer, more financially productive, and more humane streets implemented. I say this not in an elitist way—"If only we could do away with that pesky democracy!"—but in a sympathetic one.

I think most people get on an instinctive level that our transportation system produces bad outcomes that nobody is really happy with. This has given them a reflexive, and frankly healthy, mistrust of city planners and engineers and their glossy promises. 

But what most people don't have is a vocabulary to explain what the experts got wrong in the past, why they got it wrong, and what a better vision for our streets could look like. In the absence of that vocabulary, mistrust of technical expertise becomes a weapon too often fired blindly rather than aimed.

We're now in the strange in-between position in which a rapidly growing share of technical experts have already embraced the insights that you'll find in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, while the public isn't quite there yet. Chuck has told me that when he gives talks to planners and engineers, a common response is cheers and high-fives from the under-40 crowd, and puzzled or stone-faced silence from the over-55 engineers in the audience. Expert consensus is shifting.

But public consensus is slower and harder to move. In my city of Sarasota, Florida, we have a nasty stroad, Fruitville Road, dividing our downtown. It's four lanes of noisy, smelly, dangerous traffic with narrow sidewalks and zero charm. Everyone understands this: no one likes Fruitville Road. In 2019, our city planning staff, tasked with proposing a redesign of Fruitville's downtown segment, came up with a vision for an urban street that could have come straight out of Strong Towns. Fewer lanes of car traffic, wider sidewalks, street trees, roundabouts replacing stoplights to keep things moving at humane and safe speeds. A street designed to be a productive place for the community, a platform for generating wealth.

The road diet was rejected by the City Commission. The loudest sentiment from the members of the public who weigh in on such things was, "This is absolutely insane. The gridlock will be unbearable!" Suggestions aired on social media, in community meetings, and in newspaper op-eds and letters included:

"Our infrastructure isn't keeping up with all the development happening around here. We need to be talking about adding more lanes to our roads, not taking them away!"

"Maybe we should build a flyover ramp and turn Fruitville into a freeway to make it easier to get through downtown to the beach." 

"The new pedestrian signal is causing traffic delays; we shouldn't be letting people cross there!"

"The city planners seem to be determined to force people out of their cars by embracing gridlock; we need to push back against these unelected bureaucrats' agenda."

Often, citizen advocates latch on to the very same engineering concepts that held sway in the 20th century but that a younger generation of engineers is questioning and rejecting. I routinely hear references to Level of Service (a measure of how fast and free-flowing traffic is) and ITE Trip Generation Formulas (pseudoscientific estimates of how much car traffic new development will produce) from activists at public meetings.

It's roughly the same story every time a major road change is proposed. And in the minds of our elected city commissioners, it was clear in the Fruitville Road Diet debate that fear-driven public sentiment—What are these planners scheming to do to us now?—ultimately weighed more heavily than the testimony of their expert staff. They rejected the Fruitville redesign and voted to retain the dysfunctional stroad status quo.

I don't want the experts to have the power or unquestioned credibility to steamroll the public. That's not what I'm saying here. We've already seen where that got us.

Rather, I want everyone who voiced a strong opinion to the City Commission about that road diet to read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. I think we would have had a dramatically different conversation as a community if they could have.

Image via Unsplash.

A Lens for Making Sense of Your Own Experience

People have never really accepted the ideology of the traffic engineer when it comes to the places where they live and experience the downsides firsthand. Residential streets have long had homemade signs placed there by the residents to discourage speeding—"20 is Plenty" and so forth. Residents have always pushed back against, say, plans to remove shade trees from their front yards in order to create a wider "clear zone" for cars. The viral "Conversation With an Engineer" video from Strong Towns's early days—whose transcript leads off Confessions—captures this dynamic. 

When your lived experience is in play, you get it. Nobody wants the street in front of their own house to be designed to maximize traffic speed and volume, at the expense of public safety, cost, and beauty. Everyone gets that doing so results in a terrible place to be.

When it comes to anyone else's neighborhood, we push for The Standard because we've been told it's The Standard, and even if we know on some level that our driving experience after decades of The Standard isn't pleasant or safe, and the places it has produced aren't prosperous. Many of us still don't feel we know enough to credibly stand up and articulate the alternative we want to see. 

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer offers that alternative. It offers it in language anyone can understand. This is a book about engineers but not a book for engineers.

This is a rare thing: a book about why the experts in something have been systematically wrong, and that explains it so lucidly that it will empower many thousands of people outside that field to articulate why they're wrong.

I need this message to spread far and wide, because I need hundreds of my neighbors to understand it. I need it so the next time my city wants to fix a road that is killing people, those of us who live there and are endangered by it come out in support of the fix in numbers that can move the dial. Some of our planners might already get it, but they can only do so much without the rest of us.

Here's a book for the rest of us. Go read it.

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