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.
When people (rightly!) point out junk infrastructure, I sometimes say the status quo engineering depts are like the henchmen but the status quo planning depts are like the boss villain directing the henchmen.
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.
When people (rightly!) point out junk infrastructure, I sometimes say the status quo engineering depts are like the henchmen but the status quo planning depts are like the boss villain directing the henchmen.