If you drive down Cherokee Avenue in Atlanta's Grant Park neighborhood and see a car precariously balanced on two wheels atop a concrete divider, don't
most engineers actually doing the road design ‘assume’ drivers are mostly rational actors and are not overtly defensive in their design. Instead, they wait until crash data collected after the fact forces the issue.
This is absolutely wild to me. I’m an engineer, mechanical background, related to traffic in the air rather than on roads, and we have SO MANY REMINDERS pushing the idea of proactive safety measures and mistake-proofing any potential safety hazards. From industry standards to regulatory body and customer requirements, to internal procedures, backed by tools and specific courses in engineering coursework. Folks would be in jail if they acted like this, like, "yeah, that plane door might fly open if some idiot goes at it the wrong way but *shrug, we’ll tweak the design once someone actually does it and kills a planeload of people.
Don’t get me wrong: traffic engineers aren’t out there designing whatever they want with reckless disregard for [driver] safety. In fact, I would say that they’re probably more conservative than other types of engineers in terms of following established practices (especially since civil and especially traffic engineering is often more about customizing known-“good” designs to the circumstances of the site, rather than trying to innovate/improve performance the way a mechanical engineer working on a new airplane design might be).
The trouble is, the established practices themselves are wrong and bad in a lot of ways, in particular that they have a very 1950s view of what the goal of the engineer is (moving cars as fast as possible) and don’t take enough consideration of the ways that an urban street is very different than a rural highway.
Chuck Marohn of Stong Towns does a very good job of explaining it. He’s got a book and long-form videos, but I like citing his “30 days of confessions” playlist of short videos. In particular, as someone working in aviation, you might be interested in “#8 Plane Crash vs. Car Crash”, but I recommend watching them all.
This is absolutely wild to me. I’m an engineer, mechanical background, related to traffic in the air rather than on roads, and we have SO MANY REMINDERS pushing the idea of proactive safety measures and mistake-proofing any potential safety hazards. From industry standards to regulatory body and customer requirements, to internal procedures, backed by tools and specific courses in engineering coursework. Folks would be in jail if they acted like this, like, "yeah, that plane door might fly open if some idiot goes at it the wrong way but *shrug, we’ll tweak the design once someone actually does it and kills a planeload of people.
Don’t get me wrong: traffic engineers aren’t out there designing whatever they want with reckless disregard for [driver] safety. In fact, I would say that they’re probably more conservative than other types of engineers in terms of following established practices (especially since civil and especially traffic engineering is often more about customizing known-“good” designs to the circumstances of the site, rather than trying to innovate/improve performance the way a mechanical engineer working on a new airplane design might be).
The trouble is, the established practices themselves are wrong and bad in a lot of ways, in particular that they have a very 1950s view of what the goal of the engineer is (moving cars as fast as possible) and don’t take enough consideration of the ways that an urban street is very different than a rural highway.
Chuck Marohn of Stong Towns does a very good job of explaining it. He’s got a book and long-form videos, but I like citing his “30 days of confessions” playlist of short videos. In particular, as someone working in aviation, you might be interested in “#8 Plane Crash vs. Car Crash”, but I recommend watching them all.