We Are Holding Engineers Accountable for Dangerous Road Designs. The Engineering Powers That Be Want Us To Shut Up.
It’s an open secret that the design of the roadways we use is one of the major causes of traffic injuries and deaths. We all more or less know which are the most frightening and dangerous roads near the places we live, and statistics bear out those intuitions. Close to two-thirds of the more than 40,000 traffic deaths that occur annually in the United States occur on non-freeway arterial roads (or, you could say, stroads). They tend to look a lot like the photos below.
It’s something that is unpredictable in its specifics—it takes an unlucky confluence of factors at any given moment to cause a deadly crash. But it is utterly predictable, even inevitable, at a statistical level. There are streets in all of our cities that you can look at and say, “Sooner or later, someone will die here.” Places like US-19 in Florida, which Vox recently called “the deadliest road in America” in a piece that quotes Strong Towns at length.
When a crash happens, the news media will talk about driver error—”How fast were they going? Were they sleepy? Had they been drinking? Were they looking at a phone?”—and so will the crash report. They won’t talk about the way the traffic engineers built the road, the design decisions that made it a ticking time bomb. But you knew. I knew. We all knew it was a matter of time.
It turns out, however, that if you point that out too bluntly, some engineers will get very, very upset with you.
A Clash of Values
There is a pernicious ideology shaping the design of our streets, one so deeply embedded in the training of certain technical professionals that it’s scarcely ever recognized as an ideology.
Strong Towns Founder Chuck Marohn has been doing an experiment for years, with all kinds of live audiences, in all kinds of settings. He asks them a simple question: “How would you rank the following four priorities by their importance in the design of city streets?” Every single time, a clear majority of the audience ranks them like this:
Safety
Cost
Traffic Volume
Traffic Speed
How do traffic engineering protocols rank the same priorities? Like this:
Traffic Speed
Traffic Volume
Safety
Cost
Under this ranking of priorities, even local streets are designed to accommodate high speeds and free-flowing traffic, as though they were highways. To quote Chuck in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:
In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost (which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive).
The engineers doing this aren’t stupid. And they’re not evil. What they are is wedded to a very narrow set of professional standards and practices, developed around a narrow set of assumptions. And those assumptions put us all at deadly risk.
The dissonance between engineering values and the values of our communities is something Strong Towns has been working to unpack and expose since our earliest beginnings as a blog and as a movement. And it has resonated tremendously, ever since our first viral video, “Conversation With An Engineer.” (Excuse the, ahem, style. The internet was a different place in 2010.)
What we do is pull back the curtain on the hidden biases embedded in the engineering profession. For more than a decade, we’ve been demystifying for you the ways engineers use jargon and technical standards as a shield in order to avoid answering to the public for, all too often, making the places we spend our days worse and scarier places to be.
The Emperor’s Court
It will surprise no one that pointing out the emperor’s nakedness doesn’t make you very popular within the emperor’s court.
For years, engineers who feel threatened by our advocacy here at Strong Towns, or who feel that the deference their profession often enjoys is threatened, have tried to silence us. In 2015, a disgruntled engineer filed a formal complaint against Chuck Marohn’s professional engineering (PE) license. Not for any professional malpractice, but for criticizing engineering practices while writing and speaking for Strong Towns. It was dismissed.
In 2020, another such complaint led to an attempt by the Minnesota state board of engineering licensure to censure Chuck—and, by association, Strong Towns. This time, the complaint involved the late renewal of Chuck’s license—a matter that had already been discovered and promptly corrected.
It has since become abundantly clear that the renewal issue is a smokescreen for an attempt, once again, to punish Strong Towns for our speech and advocacy. You can read all the specific details here, but the short version is that the board is insistent on turning what should be a simple procedural matter into a cudgel to paint Chuck Marohn—and, by extension, Strong Towns—as someone who has defrauded and deceived the public.
We have done no such thing. What we have done, and will continue to do, is illuminate for the public how the hidden ideology of traffic engineering shapes our cities. And the old guard of the engineering profession doesn’t like the glare.
We Won’t Be Silenced
We’re determined to fight this, and we’re going to the Minnesota Court of Appeals to do so. The ability of engineers to advocate for reform is at stake here: Engineers must be able to speak freely and openly about issues concerning public welfare without fear that their colleagues will retaliate against them, threatening their professional credibility and livelihood, through the complaint process.
We’re disappointed that the board of licensure has proven itself willing to abuse its authority to suppress criticism. It didn’t have to be this way. We have no quarrel with engineers. The world needs them. Our cities need them. It’s a noble profession with countless highly competent, smart, dedicated, community-minded people among its ranks. We count many engineers among our members. And, of course, Strong Towns was founded by one.
The Strong Towns critique is not a threat to engineers, or to the practice of engineering. It’s a threat to the destructive values that have dominated the traffic engineering profession for decades. Those values could go away and not a single engineer would have to be out of a job. Quite the opposite: Armies of engineers could be gainfully employed for many decades helping to reverse the damage, to design and build humane, safe, and productive places.
We’ve said that engineers should not design streets. It’s one of the messages that has drawn significant ire. But it’s self-evident: Our local streets must serve the priorities of the people who live alongside them and use them every day. They must be the result of a process that asks, first, “What kind of place are we seeking to create?” And then we can and must enlist the technical expertise of engineers to realize that vision. Just not to override it from the outset with an ideological one centered on moving traffic at all costs.
We will continue our fight for safe and productive streets that enrich our communities and serve a higher purpose than moving cars at speed.
We will continue our fight to end highway expansion in America until we have credible plans and commitments to maintain the infrastructure we’ve already built.
Click the links above to learn about those two campaigns, and how you can get involved, in your own capacity and in the place where you live.
And all the more so if you’re an engineer. Because your city needs you, too, and so does the Strong Towns movement. Nothing we have said about engineers is a threat—except to those who have decided to stake their professional credibility on a narrow, ruinous set of assumptions about how streets ought to work, for whom, and who gets to decide.
On this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses street safety with Melany Alliston, a project manager and civil engineer with Toole Design.