Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System

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In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us.  

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.

Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, Killed by a Traffic Engineer shows how traffic engineering “research” is outdated and unexamined (at its best) and often steered by an industry and culture considering only how to get from point A to B the fastest way possible, to the detriment of safety, quality of life, equality, and planetary health. Marshall examines our need for speed and how traffic engineers disconnected it from safety, the focus on capacity and how it influences design, blaming human error, relying on faulty data, how liability drives reporting, measuring road safety outcomes, and the education (and reeducation) of traffic engineers.

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.

From the Publisher

A selection from Wes Marshall’s Killed by a Traffic Engineer

From Chapter 13: Good Cop, Bad Cop

“A common refrain we hear today is that drunk walking is just as dangerous as driving, if not more. But we never ask for whom.

In other words, who is drunk walking dangerous for? Answer: the drunk walker.

Who is the drunk driver dangerous for? Answer: everybody.

There is a massive ethical difference between the two. But traffic engineers don’t differentiate.”

From Chapter 19: The Cost of Doing Business

“In March 2020, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was trying to put the initial…pandemic deaths in perspective: ‘We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about.’

Despite the deaths and outrageous dollars we can attribute to them, that’s how we think about people dying our streets: they are the cost of doing business. In other words, we accept these deaths as an inevitable by-product of mobility and our modern lifestyle.

We treat plane or train crashes very differently from car crashes. It’s like the difference between a leaky faucet and a broken pipe. With a leaky faucet, we get used to a few drips here and there. With a broken pipe, we turn off the water completely until we figure out what is wrong and fix it.

Either way, we waste a lot of water…and a lot of lives.”

From Chapter 29: The Human Error False Flag

“When something bad happens, we want a clear and simple explanation of what went wrong to help us understand why. The inclination to blame human error is pervasive—across nearly all disciplines—because it simplifies things. It helps us feel better about the world we live in. The world is still safe as long as everyone follows the rules. People make mistakes from time to time, but don’t worry, the system is sound.

Despite the title of this book, the point isn’t to shift blame to traffic engineers. The problem is that we’ve worked under the assumption that what traffic engineers do borders on irreproachable. That assumption limits our ability to get better, but it’s easier this way.”

From Chapter 36: I Wish I knew

“Whenever we say what the road user should or shouldn’t’ve done, we are using a counterfactual. That situation never actually happened. It’s like an alternate timeline. But when it comes to road safety, traffic engineers focus on that parallel universe. The same goes for the media when they talk about road crashes. It’s logical to think counterfactuals will help us better understand human error. They won’t.”

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Island Press (June 4, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 344 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1642833304
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1642833300
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.18 x 9 inches