I’m a transportation engineer who’s been quite vocal for many years about how transportation engineers make places worse. The status quo still has many default settings to reform, the top of which are probably how intersections are analyzed, how future traffic is predicted, the design speed of streets based on surrounding land use, and how people walking and cycling are accommodated.
The industry has a long way to go, but I’m writing this in defense of transportation engineers.
In recent years I’ve heard quite a few people using the “engineers are car oriented” slogan without any understanding of what makes someone car-oriented. Part of the problem is a lack of awareness about how parts of the transportation industry have grown over the last 20 to 30 years. People who support good urbanism learn about a period in time and assume nothing has changed since.
Maybe an abridged 20th century reformation timeline will help.
In 1993, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) held its first gathering in Alexandria, Virginia. Architects, planners, developers, and transportation engineers organized against postwar sprawl development. One of the key focal points was to make walkable, mixed-use places the default again instead of a boutique exception. In 1996, CNU adopted their Charter.
Also in 1996, the New York City transportation commissioner founded the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) as a forum for city DOTs that did not see themselves reflected in the industry status quo. NACTO promoted transportation engineering that delivered walk-friendly, bike-friendly, transit-friendly places.
In 1997, Vision Zero was established as a movement to eliminate severe and fatal traffic crashes. This was a direct attack on the established norms of prioritizing vehicle speed and throughput over human life.
In 2003, the phrase “complete streets” was coined in advocacy circles around America Bikes and Smart Growth America. In 2005, the National Complete Streets Coalition formed.
In 2009, a transportation engineer formed Strong Towns, an organization that would educate ordinary people about the harms of status quo transportation and equip them to be agents of change.
In 2011 and 2013, NACTO published the Urban Bikeway Design Guide and the Urban Street Design Guide. Those documents finally gave city staff something they could point to that was not a rural highway manual with a sidewalk footnote. FHWA later accepted them for use alongside mandated guidance.
Even the traditional organizations like Institute of Transportation Engineers and American Planning Association are showcasing work that is centered on human flourishing. Look up any of the conference agendas for these groups and you’ll see what I mean. Just in the last 10 years, I’ve given over 100 keynotes, workshops, and presentations about how reformers can and are improving the outcomes of the industry, and I’m just one person.
None of this means the philosophical defaults I listed at the top—intersection analysis, traffic forecasts, design speed, walking and cycling accommodation—have been retired. We’re still surrounded by fuddy-duddy conformists. But understand that a continually growing number of transportation engineers are nonconformists who are changing culture with or without the status quo’s support.
In fact, a licensed professional engineer is often more of an ally for better infrastructure than a certified planner. (If you’re a planner, before you complain at me, know that I say this as an AICP who’s been working with planners and engineers since the late 90s.)
The vast majority of Americans remain utterly dependent on cars to get around because of planning. The rules for what/where/how/if you can build are driven by local planning departments. The engineering department doesn’t outlaw mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. Traffic engineers aren’t the ones requiring traffic studies for the new apartment building or rejecting it because you don’t have enough parking spaces for cars.
The purpose of a system is what it does. What do most planning systems do? They assume everyone will always drive everywhere for everything. (More about POSIWID here.)
So yes, you should absolutely continue to criticize the status quo methodology for analyzing and engineering transportation systems. But considering the remarkable impact of groups like CNU and NACTO, chances are good there’s a transportation reformer near you.
I wish I could say the same about the planning industry that keeps Americans trapped in car-dependent lifestyles. I’m hopeful though, because I know things do get better in the end.
Learn more about transportation reform:
My career in this industry started in 2011 in DC so I caught some of the tail end of the hardcore anti-human traffic engineering ethos, lived through the slow and painful acceptance of the safe systems approach, and the slight overcorrection / euphoria in recent years (I say this with love, but many got carried away with doing things that really didn't/don't make sense or that could be done in better ways with fewer impacts). The core thing that people get wrong about traffic engineers is that we are problem solvers. But we solve the problems we are asked to solve. If the powers that be ask us to solve for traffic flow, we can do that better than anyone (see Florida for example of traffic flow maximization run amok). Conversely, if they ask us to solve for safe and efficient human-based systems, we can do that too. But! We also get frustrated when the same person that asked us (told us??) to do the latter comes back to us and asks what happened to the former when we implemented the latter. Urban roads are most often a zero sum game. If we want to maximize safety we almost certainly have to reduce capacity and throughput. The sooner everyone can admit that the safe and efficient design of public right-of-way is a purely political decision and not an engineering magic trick, the sooner we can unleash the talents of the rest of the traffic engineers out there to get us there.