Killed by a Traffic Engineer
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Average rating3.5
Fixing the carnage on our roadways requires a change in mindset and a dramatic transformation of transportation. This goes for traffic engineers in particular because they are still the ones in charge of our streets. In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture. Killed by a Traffic Engineer is ultimately hopeful about what is possible once we shift our thinking and demand streets engineered for the safety of people, both outside and inside of cars. It will make you look at your city and streets--and traffic engineers--in a new light and inspire you to take action.
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This could have been a five-star book if there had been an editor who could have stood up to the author and fought for the reader’s interest in the same way the author fights for the interests of people against the ignorance and arrogance of the traffic engineering profession. It’s a hugely important topic, deeply informed and passionate author with important insights to share. The problem is, the book reads as if it’s 88 blog posts glued together almost verbatim, and the deep work of actually building all that material into a coherent work rather than just a compilation of separate works was simply skipped.
The author is probably a terrific classroom teacher, but the jokey asides that work so well in person just come off as snarky half the time in print. Further, about half the footnotes are worthwhile, but half are just japes … again, probably workable and useful in the classroom or on a video to help people keep paying attention, but they are just distracting and annoying in the text. Worse, the microscopic mice type font used for footnotes and endnotes make it impossible to actually go from the text to the footnotes readily.
This would have been a much better book if the author had been forced to condense it into several long-read magazine articles, and given some help from the graphics department to put some good graphics in, especially a timeline or two that could have served to SHOW the reader how the more traffic engineering we got, the worse our safety got. Instead, he spends pages and pages trying to use text to explain something that is easily grasped if shown graphically. The best part of the book is the final two sections, which would have better been placed at the beginning to motivate the rest of the work.
I would love to read a second edition of this book if he takes his own (repeated over and over again) advice to others to actually TEST the product in the real world rather than just assuming that because he’s credentialed, what he produces is the best way to produce it. Just as his peers in traffic engineering need to start designing for safety of people using the product, the author needs to rework the book with the reader at the center.
