How One Professor is Inspiring the Next Generation of Transportation Engineers
This year marks Professor Gingrich’s third at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa. It’s his second year teaching a course on transportation engineering. However, for the first time ever, Gingrich has assigned "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" by Charles Marohn to his students.
It’s an unusual choice because the book famously puts the values that underpin the engineering profession on trial. In it, Marohn confronts his past self, an engineer who dismissed the claims of residents in favor of his own expertise — after all, he went to school for this. Moreover, this is what’s in the code and the code is correct, so this must also be correct.
“It's a totally satisfying book about all that is wrong about transportation planning in our cities,” one reader said. That’s why it was a bestseller. It’s also why it’s an unlikely classroom companion, particularly for the next generation of engineers who are only beginning to familiarize themselves with the same protocols that Marohn scrutinizes.
“I have loved it!” one student, Wade, said when Gingrich asked what he thought of the book and how it compared to traditional engineering courses. “It is an interesting perspective that we’d never really get to hear about if it wasn’t for 'Confessions'.” Others appreciate the book for contextualizing the regulations they’re memorizing for the exam. “It is interesting to see how much engineers can look only at what the code tells them and not the project as a whole,” another student, Austin, said.
Evolving Engineering Curriculum for Future Needs
Last year, when he led this course for the first time, Gingrich used the standard materials, the ones necessary for the fundamentals of engineering (or FE) exam. He had his reservations. “This just doesn’t feel right,” he recalled thinking. “You’re taught to take for granted what shows up in the codes.” It didn’t square with his own values. Neither did it align with what his university was preaching.
“[Early in the book, Marohn] talks about the values behind the codes. Here at Dordt, we’re a Christian institution, and so we have a lot of faith-based connections with the idea of values,” Gingrich noted. That’s why the university is very open to materials that supplement the required reading, he added. “We are actually encouraged to bring in perspectives that more philosophically teach you how to think about the profession of engineering, rather than just the practice of engineering. What are the values that we would consider important?”
As he trains the next generation of engineers, Gingrich is hoping that his students will continue interrogating the truths of their profession. That, when they go and improve upon the work of their predecessors, they’ll consider what values underpinned those past decisions and what values are going to inform their own. To that end, he’s not just guiding his students through Marohn’s book, he’s also integrating a new model for analyzing crashes into the curriculum.
Crash Analysis in the Classroom
Conventionally, crashes are examined through the lens of liability. Every party involved, from law enforcement to the media to the judicial system, is interested in what actions and behaviors resulted in the collision. Was the driver impaired? Was the bicyclist wearing a helmet? Was the pedestrian jaywalking? These are the sorts of questions that characterize the investigation. Generally absent is any serious consideration of how road design contributed to the severity of the tragedy.
In adopting the Crash Analysis Studio model, the class will be able to engage with a new methodology that looks beyond blame. One that takes into account every contributing factor, including signage clutter, lane width, turn radii, and a medley of design choices that, when analyzed in concert, will hopefully answer “why” a crash occurred instead of just “how.”
In using this model, engineers can enter a conversation from which they’re systematically excluded. In the aftermath of a collision, law enforcement communicates with everyone from first responders and the media to legal counsel, insurance companies and even elected officials in select cases. Engineers typically don’t make the list. Yet, engineers are responsible for how the road on which the collision occurred was designed and, furthermore, how it will continue to look and feel for the weeks and months afterward.
“I think the biggest thing is looking at what is the impact that their role as engineers can have on the safety process, and having kind of the idea more deeper than what just the code tells them is correct,” Gingrich told me. When so many of the 44,450 fatal crashes cataloged in 2023 happened on the same roads, often less than a mile apart, it’s worth questioning how road design is contributing to that frequency and how engineers can work alongside leaders to proactively address unsafe road conditions.
“And so I think a lot of what we need to look at is kind of like, when does the code break? And when do we encounter a setup that doesn't allow for what we're thinking about in the code to actually play out in real life?” he added. “And are we willing to be humble enough to recognize when that doesn't work, to make the change that needs to be made?”
Part of adopting the Crash Analysis Studio model involves humbly observing and documenting the realities of the chosen crash site. He hopes that, when his class goes out, they’ll be able to recognize what role they play in the driver speeds and behaviors they’ll witness, the challenges people walking or biking may face navigating the area, and the close calls that seem to be a routine stress for anyone navigating Sioux Center.
Safe Road Design Is For Small Towns Too
Sioux Center is a small city of just under 8,000 inhabitants that's surrounded by a suburban and rural development pattern. There isn’t much of a downtown, Gingrich tells me, and therefore not much to walk to. It’s a place where car travel clearly dominates, even for the smallest tasks, though that doesn’t mean that other modes of mobility don’t exist.
For example, in the last decade alone, nearly half a dozen cyclists have been fatally struck in Sioux County, over half of those in the city itself. High speeds were cited as a cause in at least three fatal vehicle-on-pedestrian crashes in the last two years. These figures don’t include injurious nonfatal crashes or those narrowly avoided collisions that never make it into a police report or news story yet can irreversibly damage one’s confidence commuting outside of a car or simply embarking on a leisurely stroll through the city.
Once the class conducts its own Crash Analysis Studio, it'll join over 21 cities across North America that have taken a closer look at why crashes happen and what we — engineers, planners, and concerned citizens — can do to stop them.
If you want to bring the Crash Analysis Studio to your classroom, you can share and teach our free online course. If you have questions for our team about this process, or if you’d like a Strong Towns expert to speak with your class, email us at studio@strongtowns.org.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.