Author Wes Marshall discussed his new book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer. His book reveals the profession’s shaky, unscientific foundations—and points the way to safer, healthier streets. The webinar was moderated by Rob Steuteville.
On the park bench. I'm going to pass this along to you. For your presentation. Alrighty, thank you very much, Rob. Let me get this up and running here. Alright, thank you all for joining. My name is West Marshall and as Rob said I wrote this book that came out recently and it's a So, 400 plus page books, so I'm clearly not gonna be able to get to. Sure everything in it, or do I want to? Like I want to sort of save some of the surprising stories in there. For when and if you get a chance to read it. So. Today I'm gonna start here. So I recently presented at the International Making Cities Liverpool Conference while I was putting together that presentation. I thought it'd be fun to ask AI to show me an image of a Liverpool city. And this is what I got. Hi, what an unlivable city might look like. And this is what I got. You don't have to look hard to figure out what sets these 2 places apart. And the biggest difference. She's using transportation. Another thing to test them apart is likely to be road safety. So how big of a road safety problem do we even have? There are a lot of ways I could explain this. One might be to say that I think globally more people die on our roads every single day than died in the 9 11 attacks. In the US, we started collecting. This data in 1899. So there were 26 people killed in a rose that year. We hit a hundred 1,000 deaths, 1922. 500,000 deaths in 37. A 1 million deaths in 1953 by 1960 more Americans have been killed in our roads, then had died in all of our wars. Combined, including the Revolutionary War. We had 2 million in 1975. 3 million in 1998 and based on my estimates the state is out yet. We would have had 4 million earlier this year. Some people might ask how many those people pedestrians like this day doesn't, didn't do a great job of collecting this data in the early days of distinguishing by mode. My estimates around 860,000 of these 4 million deaths are pedestrian. Number 71,000 of those are bicyclists. Combined. I think we're on track to hit a total of a million pedestrian bicyclists deaths within within the next decade or so. So how do we fix this? One popular approach has been Vision 0. You likely already know all about Vision 0 in its history dating back to Sweden in the early nineties. In theory, this is 0 is in the slogan or a tagline or even a safety intervention. The idea is that we need to approach road safety in a. Sort of fundamentally different way. Where we treat road safety more like. The health impact that it really is. Cause after all, you know, dying on your road, the roads is definitely not good for your health. So. Denver is one of the cities that jumped on board as did a lot of other ones. Is it working? Well, if you ask an engineer this question, they might show you A graph like this. This is road fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled from 1,900 or so. I think 19 0 8 is early year I did this for up to Up to now. And they might say this. But if we treat road safety like a health impact. Like we sort of should with Division 0 and compare ourselves to for instance the other OAC. D countries. Here we're looking at road fatalities per 100,000 population. We are doing nearly as well. And if you look at things at the city level, you know, we just hit the 10 year mark, the 10 year anniversary of New York City. Adopting vision 0 in the results of a recent report. Here's the big takeaway. Similar things can be said about other places like Portland, Oregon where Not only is the Portland region failed to meet almost all of its goals. In fact, They're heading in the wrong direction since vision 0 has been implemented. Similar results are showing everywhere else. The point revision 0 is just being deemed to failure. Well, why is it working? Make sure, May. Sound works here. Let me start with this. So one of the things I see this problematic is that traffic engineers are just simply measuring the wrong thing. Let me give you example. Here are these 2 places. Let's say both of them have a fatalities. VM to use the vehicle miles travel so that's the denominator and our crash rates are fatalities for VMT or per 1 million VNT in this case. If you look at this, what does it tell you? Well, it tells you that the place we see in the top is twice. As safe as the place on the bottom. And if you do it like any other health impact, you do a per population. You can see you might get completely different results. And it seems so obvious that, you know, where would you rather want to live? You'd rather live in the place at the bottom. Like you are safer as a person. But traffic engineers are. Still entirely focused on the 1st set of rates. But most humans would define safety very differently. You know, one of the things I try to do in my book is not just point out all the Bron things that traffic engineers are doing and tell them how to do it better. I really want to understand why we do what we do. So I dove down like dozens of different rabbitles trying to kind of figure out the origin stories. Down one of these rabbit holes I found this guy, Paul Hoffman. He was known as the civic leader of the safety movement. And prior to becoming this so-called civic leader of the safety movement, Paul was the CEO of the car company Studebaker. In the mid thirties, Paul wasn't that happy that cars being made to look unsafe. If you've read LGR backs, super useful book. I have it right here that. Yes. You looked at this a little bit. He found You know, Hoffman saying things like he was Convinced that publicity about traffic crashes were bad for selling cars. And Hoffman made the right point that traffic engineers need an exposure metric, but he just simply chose the one he liked best. That would help make cars look nice and safe for years to come. And then you wrote a book about it. Published this book 7 rows of safety, 1,939, and any bar star in the country selling this new way of measuring safety to a burgeoning new traffic engineering discipline. Not only did we buy what he was selling, but Congress ended up codifying it, I think in 1966. When they created the 1st federal road agency on safety. The other reason is That it's not working is that most places, you know, maybe they add a few bike lanes here and there, but they have not fundamentally changed anything they're doing. In other words, many. Of the cities that declare vision 0 are just doing the same old same old under a new catchphrase. And that's kind of what we've been doing with vision 0 in a lot of places. I mean, even nationally, the US DOT and Ash, they're you know, seemingly more pragmatic towards 0 death slogan as a national strategy. I think this is 2,011 and during like this, so treat sequence what they called the decade of action. You know, all the state DOT have to submit. Like their goal for the number of pedestrian bicyclists deaths like the following year. And if you look at the details of those submissions, a lot of them, their goal for the future years was more pedestrian. In bicycle as then the previous year. So in other words, we're just doing business as usual under a new umbrella. Alright, what should cities be doing? Well, to this day, I see conference presentations at Rose Safety Conferences selling. This 3 E approach to road safety. This is example one such presentation. Well, what does that mean? Well, The 3 E's stand for engineering. Education enforcement and it goes back to well before Paul Hoffman's 1,939 book and it kicks off the main editorial in the 1st issue of the main traffic engineering journal of his time that I looked at a lot to kind of try to get the voices of the traffic engineers from these early days traffic quarterly and its 1st editorial in 19 47. I mean they lay it out the current old Robert Gadz tells us that it all starts. Engineering education enforcement. So, some people. Like Boulder, Colorado started adding new E's to the pod and Heating the advice of people like Mike Bloomberg and God retrust. Everyone else bring data. And the goal is to do what we all think we want. We want to have a more data driven approach to road safety. So they added a 4, th the evaluation to the pod and they dug through their data and what do they find? Well, They found the most of our crashes are caused by human error. This number comes to us this 94% number comes to us from a NITS of reports, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Where they say that the critical reason for 94% of crashes, you know, plus or minus 2.2% is related to. Driver error. Of course they also say that the critical reason should not be interpreted as the cause of the crash or something we usually sign blame, but people still use it the photographics like this. We're the main takeaways that we can blame almost all of our road safety problems on the road users themselves. And if human error is the biggest problem, well, what's the solution? Usually the magic elixirs technology and if you read Peter Norden's new book, you'll see that we have this technological carrot kind of hanging 5 years in front of us all the time. Always thinking it's gonna save the day from us needing to do anything differently. They've been saying the same thing for decades and decades and we still aren't that much closer. In fact, the study came out last week where they were saying the self driving cars are safer except at dawn at dusk and whenever they make a turn And I guess don't get me started on Tesla's so-called self-driving. So while many traffic engineers are happy to wait for technology to save the day. Others will go back to where 3 E's and if 90% of our crashes are caused by 90 plus percent are caused by human. Behavior errors this implies that 90 plus percent of our solutions need to correct those sort of behaviors. So we focus on These 2, the education and the enforcement. Most cities might do something in the enforcement route. For instance, New York City started by cracking down all the Jay Walkers and Skopplas Cyclists. And they issued actually more tickets to cyclists than truck drivers, even though the year this data comes from 43 truck drivers killed pedestrians or cyclists and only one pedestrian was fatally hit by bicyclists. Doesn't mean it's not doesn't happen, but we're sort of putting our eggs in the wrong basket. And when I was putting this together I noticed that within the last 2 weeks in Cambridge Mass these 2 women were killed by bicyclists by right turning trucks. In Cambridge, Mass. And this is the city council that just voted to slow down the rollout of their protected bike and infrastructure network. Anyways, the problem more than enforcement, usually that is temporary. Things often go back to the status quo. You know, we also have plenty of evidence that racial disparities and enforcement and way too many examples of police killing. Minorities during a traffic stop for minor or invisible infraction. But then you add that to the. Hear the universal fear that automated camera enforcement. It's a giant crash grab or way for big brother to start surveilling us. And many agencies instead focus on the lowest hanging fruit, which is education. That's a Boulder did when they're doing their vision 0 they went through the data taking a data-driven approach and they came up with their version of safety as a shared responsibility. And you see similar things from nearly every agency. Such as the Colorado DOT with this fun one telling us that as a pedestrian we need to make eye contact. With the driver when crossing the street. The same apparently goes for dogs and What does this mean for I think there's 12 million people that are visually impaired and 1.2 people in this country that are blind. What does it mean for them? Who knows? But sure is fun to dress up. Some seed on employees and giant eyeball heads and make them cross the street like this intersection is actually the one. Right outside my window here in downtown Denver. And again, what will traffic engineers tell you? Like, well, we did our job. The reality of human error is not that simple. So let me just talk a little bit of what's really behind some of these crashes. So as an example, pretend you're on a like urban arterial. You're taking a left turn at a permissive. Green light. So this means that you're looking for a gap in the oncoming traffic. What happens at the same time? We're also telling a pedestrian. That is their turn to walk. We give them the white walk signal. So you're sitting there looking for a gap, trying to get through the intersection. You might have back pressure from other cars. And you do this, you have a pedestrian. Well, how does this get classified in our crash database? Well, this is a human error problem. This is a problem with the driver didn't yield the right away to pedestrian or maybe the passenger need to yield her right away to the driver. Whatever it might be. It's a human error problem, so we focus on educating these road users that they should be more careful, right? But I would argue we put both of these people in a bad situation. Like not only in terms of the dent sound of the street, but we know cars have that sort of a pillar. Where you can't even see like The blind spot in your car is exactly where we're telling pedestrians is their turn to cross and cross safely. But. The crash ends up as a human error crash and nothing to do with engineering behind it. Here's another example. This is a crash from Vancouver, Washington a few years ago. I happen to see this crash the morning that it happens, right? Ended up spending a lot of the day following. What happened? Early morning crash, 2 boys were walking to school. I think it was 6 30 a. M. They were hit by this pickup truck. And they were jay walking. Here's Taylor and Andrew. They're walking from their house. To the school. How does this crash get classified? It's a simple. Jay walking crash. The pedestrians did not yield the right away. To this driver. What if we zoom out a little bit and think about the situation that we It's traffic engineers or transportation planners put them in like here's the intersection where they crossed. Where's the nearest crosswalk? Well, it's a quarter mile away. And even if you go to that crosswalk, here's what it's look like. You're crossing what 7 or 8 lanes of traffic with the faded. Here's the other one which isn't much better. Well, what are the sidewalks like between there? I mean, some places they're decent. Other places are missing. Like here you can see . There It's impossible to even walk along this side walk. Then at the corners where they have to cross, we have these huge turning radii. Where you have cars for like turning off that major street pretty quickly. So why did they cross here? Well, it's the rational thing to do. Like they made a rational decision based on the Terrible transportation system we put in front of them. But it gets chopped up as a Jay walking crash. And then to add insult to injury we Plain these kids were wearing dark clothing. Like they're high school boys and it's not Like the 19 eighties were kids who were in like neon, of course they were wearing dark floating. And we know this about high school kids. What's the problem with this? One, unless. Us off the hook and not off the hook in a good way. I just, this is off the hook from Do anything better and It also takes away our feedback loop. So we never learned from our mistakes. So yes, there are traffic engineers that are gonna make changes to our infrastructure and throw a band-aid on things. They're a band-aid here through a band-aid there. But when you zoom out and look at every city's high entry network, we're typically like 50 or 60%. Your city's road fatalities or severe injuries take place and only, you know, 5 or 6% of your city streets. Those same high injury networks, trees tend to be Our most highly traffic engineered streets. So when you look at what we built, like this is one of them here in Denver. And given all that we know about what makes the streets safe. Like while I love my friends and colleagues at C. Dot, I'm It's hard to say that it's really safety first.st So the way we end up tacking our road safety problems isn't to attack the fundamentals of it is to play it like whack-a-mole. And given what we build, there We don't have enough bandage to fix this problem. And it's really hard to put a band-aid on an example like this. Like this is a There's no meeting here, but it's 245 feet from curve to curve for classroom crossing this. So, you know, in 3 and a half feet per second, which is our assumption. For walking this would take more than 70 seconds to cross. And this crossroad comes to us from a new urbanist community. In China. Alright, and. One of the other fundamental issues. Is that transportation engineering is a sub discipline of simple engineering. So when I was an undergraduate, I took courses in structural engineering hydrology, geotechnical engineering. In those courses, we're typically taught to figure out maybe a design load and we multiply it by like 3 to give ourselves a factor of safety. A bigger beam like this might cost us a little bit more, but it'll be safer. And this factor safety mentality seeps through all of civil engineering, which makes sense when it comes to a culvert. Or bridge or building. But the factor safety mindset does not make as much sense in transportation. Why? Well, you know, Mother Nature doesn't care how big a beam is. It's not like it's gonna get anyone to here and Same thing with like a cover like. The amount of rain is not really dependent on besides that one culvert but if we put a wider road in front of a human differently. You know, if human behaves the exact same on an hour road as they do on a super wide road, it makes perfect sense. They were going to be safer because we given them. You know, the factor safety, but if they don't. You know, there isn't a big enough band-aid to fix something like this. So we can do better. It's not this. And when I look at infrastructure like that, you know, I'd say we're at best safety 3.rd And even worse, you know, we tell kids to bite to school on streets like this. Not only do we blame, you know, one or the other road, you just want to crash happens. Like in the case like this, we don't even record this crash in any database. Cause it's a door and crush. There's no moving vehicle. Involved so this does not get into a typical engineering crash database. At the same time, there's no reason we can't build streets that look more like this. I guess there is a reason. Well, because a lot of the 1,000 page manuals that I was given as a young traffic engineer Don't show us anything like that. So when we say we can't, Do anything but a facility like this. I mean, that is why. The general public looks at traffic engineering, oftentimes more like a religion in the science. As you can tell, I had a little fun using the AI in the generator, like this one was called the sacred art of traffic flow. But to be honest, most traffic engineers in their undergraduate years, maybe take one or 2 transportation engineering courses. I took one. It didn't stop me from working in this field. It didn't stop me from getting a professional engineering license. In fact, away civil engineering accreditation works is that you only need like sort of 4 sub disciplines of cell engineering. So some universities have 0 transportation courses and they're still accredited. Some professional engineers that are licensed traffic engineers have never ever taken a single transportation engineering course, let alone, you know, one dedicated road safety. Thus, when you think about it, it starts to make perfect sense why. Traffic engineers treat these books so reverently because we don't Often no any better and we assume that whoever wrote them news more than I do. We assume they did their homework. We assume that they're steeped in 100 years of science. And that's why I wrote my book to show that a lot of those assumptions when I went down those rabbit holes were not even close to true. So if you take a look at the IT form, which is basically the pro. For traffic engineers. There is a debate raging about Me in the book. What's both funny and to me a little sad is that the most for her voice is calling, you know, for me to resign and stuff or also refusing to read the book. So by sticking their heads in the proverbial sidewalk, they're basically proving my point. And they're gonna keep building big streets like this would be clear zones because that's what the guidebooks tell them is safe. And that's what the theories tell them is safe. Even though there is empirical research out there including by me and people like Eric Dumbo, like a lot of people showing that. Urban streets like this will kill far fewer people. And they're gonna build big old turning radii that promote fast speeds because that is what our guidelines. What was it? We know they're gonna make things less safe, pedestrians. Even though there's plenty of empirical research telling us the corners like this are far safer. And to sort of finish things up here, I have a hard time putting much stock into. You know, a lot of the fancy new technologies that are coming to save the day. If we can't even get the sidewalks right in a major city like Denver. And these are pictures I took. Myself in and around downtown Denver. And you can see in this one that you have a curve ramp you have actually a bus stop up there and Nothing in between. This is a connection we get folks to what is our multi 1 billion dollar light rail investment. You know, we build sidewalks that are too narrow for 2 people to walk side by side. Which will for someone with a stroller or wheelchair into the street. And if this guy gets hit by a car, the crash data is gonna blame one user road user or the other. So by no means am I trying to let bad behavior by road users off the hook. But by focusing on the so-called Errors, it's useful for police, it's useful for insurance companies, but it's not. Useful for us. So instead of trying to place blame. On road users we need to take a step back and understand you know, where design, where engineering plays a role in the errors that cause the crash. In other words, ask why? Like why is this person in the street? What can we do better? Should end with I start my book off by comparing traffic engineers to doctors because doctors have been around for 5,000 years for the 1,000 or so, you could easily make the case that they killed more people than they saved. But as an empirical science. They got better. Traffic engineering is only about a hundred years old. And we're still on the stage where we're killing more people than we saved. I'm just trying to have little self-reflection so we can get back to being the empirical science. We need to be to get better. Thank you very much. Thank you, West. Excellent. I wanted to remind everybody to use the Q&A function of zoom if you have any questions for Wes. I'm gonna we're gonna start a conversation here and then we're gonna go to QA. I, you know, listening to what you're saying, it strikes me that the complete streets movement was even a bigger example of the declare bankruptcy thing that you talked about. I think there was something like 1,500 or 2,000 complete streets. Ordinances or laws passed in nearly every state of the country. And I've never seen any significant change in traffic engineering as a result of the complete streets laws that were passed. It just seems like they've continued on for the most part the same. I don't know what you observations are with those that Yeah, I do think if you look at, you know, what the original complete streets people were saying was when you do a better job of accommodating and thinking about designing for bikes, pedestrians and that sort of stuff. It's different than sort of how it was in. And I think part of the reason is that complete streets word, whereas interpreted as we need to put. You know, every type of mode and every type of street. So You know, if you look at Denver, for instance, like one of, and I bike to work, one of the roads where they put a bike was on MLK Boulevard. And it is not the best place to bike, even with that bike land. If you move over one or 2 streets. It's a much lower stress, much nicer environment. So. A lot of times we're putting bicyclists in a bad situation instead of thinking about what is sort of best from a network perspective. So I think it was just a misinterpretation. Part of the reason is just that word complete streets make you think we need to throw every mode. On every major road which can lead us in the wrong direction if we're not thinking bigger picture. Hmm. In my review, which has gotten over 5,000 reads on public square and I think that you've probably gotten some other, you know, attention that in far bigger platforms in public square. But, but I can compare this to Donald Trump's book, The High Cost of Free Parking. And which is sort of an ambitious comparison because it's that's been one of the most impactful books on the built environment over the last 20 years. If not the most, but, you know. Don't you, Don't you points out that the lack of common sense and science behind parking requirements, he also writes in sort of an accessible humor style, but it's very academic. I mean, you know, he really cites chapter and verse goes back to the origins of where this came about and really shows kind of in many cases the ridiculousness. Of of, parking requirements. And it's a book that, that has had an impact over a long period of time. And one of the reasons was I think that it empowered people who were not planners to challenge. Parking requirements and to say, you know, look, this, you know, this is really ridiculous and, and you defend them if you can't defend them, I think that we need to reform them. And so, over time it has reformed parking requirements. Your book is kind of It's very readable and accessible, but it's also highly academic and what you do is is really challenge the foundations of some of these practices, almost all practices in transportation engineering and you're showing how the origins really don't hold up if you examine where they came from. Do, were you thinking of Donald Trump as a model at all when you were writing this? So I mean, 1st of all, thank you for the amazing comparison to, and this book. Now I will say my first, st like when I 1st got to Yukon as a grad student, Norman was off on sabbatical and you sort of handed me this project project on parking. And I think as a young grass student, you're like, what? Parking like, is that important? Like, who cares? And He, Norman also handed me a bunch of Donald Schoops papers and this is before the high cost of free parking came out. So I was deep in the weeds in Donald Trump's work, back in like 2,004. So when his book finally came out, I'd already sort of read all those things and But I think that influence me in a lot of ways, like that was sort of my first.st Kind of real academic and, my 1st 2 papers were on parking so And he's such a nice guy. He's been helpful. He wrote a very nice blurb for the back of my book as well. So I don't think I was consciously trying to emulate him but his style and like it's a similar thing. I think a lot of the parking stuff. You know, a lot of the engineers thought these were based in science. A lot of the planners thought those numbers came from somewhere and he showed that they didn't. And I think it's the same case for a lot of the stuff that traffic engineers do. Like. It's in these manuals. You assume that whoever wrote them Did the homework and it a lot of times it turns out not to be true. So we're basing things on theory. As opposed to empirical results and instead of just relying on the theory, maybe some of those theories are right, but I want to push us to be more self-reflective and to Try to make sure like let's double check like cause the people back then were clearly stating that they didn't know what they were doing that they were just wanting to give something a try. And for whatever reason, like 10 or 20 years later, we sort of remove those caveats and we just kept whatever was. And you know, 30 years down the line, we even forget there wasn't any caveats like. And that's sort of what I found that is similar to I think what Donald Shoot found is a lot of those numbers. Weren't nearly as scientific as we all were led to believe. So despite the title, I don't want to blame traffic engineers because they're just doing what they were taught they're doing what these books say. And it's hard for them. They don't have the time to do what I did and dig into. Thousands of old journal articles to do something like this. So. I'm trying to help. Yeah, so yeah. Give kind of an example like one thing that sticks in my mind was the was the The painted lines on the roads. And you were you actually looked into I mean this DOT spend millions of dollars a year every one of them on repainting the lines on the roads. And you wanted to look into what is the scientific basis for that. And you found a couple of studies in the 19 fiftys where they did real scientific studies. Does this improve safety or not? And they found out that No, it really doesn't improve safety to actually the accidents in the injuries increased when they painted. The sides of the roads and rather than look at that further They just decided not to do any more studies and just continue what they were doing. You know so that was that was one that It stuck in my mind. And also, you know, some of the work that you talked about was street with. And you looked at what are the what's the real origins of these, you know, these lane widths that we have that create this high injury network in every metro region in the country. Were you kind of surprised that at, sort of the lack of backing for a lot of these things or? Or is that what you expected to find? You know, some of the, I mean, I. I found different things on different rabbit holes like with the the edge line one was weird so that was Ohio and Kansas they did those edge line studies the white lines on the side of like those rural highways and they want to know if they were safer enough they actually did a real study and the study was telling them that they made things less safe. But they went ahead and did in many ways with like the lane width one and like street with in general. And I was always taught that water rows were safer. Like that's what we were told. And we assumed like maybe there. We assume there was some research pointing us. Just saying that was very true. And when I found those original studies, Like there's a couple of studies from like the 19 thirties and one of them like the 1st one. I think, no, this would have been the 3rd one. Like was they compared 18 feet to 20 feet to 22. The 24. So the widest road in that study was 24 feet curved occur. Right, which is narrower than any road we'd make today. And in that study, yes. 24 feet was safer than 18 and they made that point clearly and we cited that paper and the 2 other papers that were very similar like that. We're like again, 10 or 20 years, but then we stop citing it. But the idea has persisted that wider rows are safer. So. Again, like maybe they are, but we can't base it just on those single studies and you know, as I show a lot of the newer research shows that there's not. Yeah. And those were like rural roads, weren't they studying, you know, as opposed to like a, highly populated area. You know, so talking about it's, it's a little bit more difficult talking about the solutions. I mean, this is a complicated problem. And, you know, You sort of talked about a couple of different categories of solutions. One thing talked about was Jane Jacobs, you gave an example of Jane Jacobs who was in consulted by a traffic engineer in the early 19 seventys for building a new residential mixed use area in Toronto from an industrial area and she said no you know you're studying all the wrong things you need to just go to the best in Toronto's, Toronto's best neighborhoods, and then copy it and put it, and which is essentially what she, what was done is from my understanding, which is pretty amazing. So that's kind of the approach that new urbanists have taken. But then you have entire regions that have been, you know, built according to dubious practices and sciences over the years and how do you reform those. And you talk about the Marie condo approach and I wanted you to like talk about that a little bit. So, I mean, it's. I'm trying, I mean, you've seen a lot of my research over the years, Robin. I feel like I'm always sort of chipping away the tip of the iceberg of all the things we're kind of doing wrong and could do better showing that you know, empirically this is safer than this and we should be doing that. With this book, I was really trying to get more at the foundation, like to show that the foundation of a lot of what we do isn't nearly as strong as we were led to believe. So instead of that whack-a-mole approach where we're just kinda looking for things that are relatively worse in terms of safety than others. The idea is to sort of rethink. You know, cause my book was already 400 plus pages and the you know originally it was you know longer than Asgadan I had to cut it down just for the sake of publishing so there wasn't a ton of room to dive too deep into, you know, kind of what we should be doing. So I was really just trying to set us on a fundamentally different path and I came across the Maricondo idea of like how she cleans a house. And she said something to the effect of You know, if you're going room to room, like it's kinda like playing whack-a-mole like you. Never understand the scale of some of the problems you have. So she puts like all the clothes you own in one spot and she deals with that category first.st And it gives you a sense of not just the scale of the problem, but where you might be repeating your mistakes. And we don't do that like we sort of do this whack-a-mole approach. Instead, if we focus on a category and the 1st one I talk about is like kids, like how do we? Make our cities safer for kids like look to where they live, where they're going, look at schools like a parks, look to design our roads differently. They're not gonna walk 3 and a half feet per second. They're gonna meander across the street like You know, they can't be seen under the big cars. Like, so we need to make sure cars are further back from those corners near their school. So we could kind of focus on that one category first.st And do all the things we need to do to make things safer for kids and it gives us a fundamentally different way. To do something like safe systems or vision 0 as opposed to just you know trying to throw band-aids on things. I'm gonna get to some of the questions that we, we actually have some questions piling up in the QA. Matt Petty talks about, brings up the issue. What about aligning budget spending proportionately with mode share goals? Have you heard about That is that a is that a way to approach this? I try not to deal too much with sort of budget for the sake of this book. I mean, cause a lot of times it's outside of the per view. A lot of traffic engineers like the interesting thing I always find is like for whatever reason we can never find the money to like fix the sidewalks or do the bike lanes but we always have enough money. To do a 10 million dollar interchange or do a billion dollar highway expansion. So I think it's a matter of kind of aligning the pots like the question is suggesting to better match what our vision is. So that could work, but I didn't dig into. Whether it does or not. We've a question from Jacob. How do we convince our traffic engineers and elect officials to give up speed and capacity for safety and equity? One of the myths I try to dispel in the book is that a lot of the methods we use traffic engineers, we assume safety is sort of embedded within that. So when we do things planning for capacity planning for speed. You know, the thinking and like the early research made us believe that it was. To make things safer. So by kind of pulling the, back and showing that those researchers weren't saying that nor did they. Ever think that so like in terms of like level of service. You can't, when you read how that came together, it sort of feels almost ad hoc and they said at that time we need to add safety to this. And they never did. So I think that is where we need to. You know, understand and this also speaks maybe to that's. Myth that safety is our 1st priority because it's not typically his capacity. Maybe speed second. Safety is is not in the top 2 most of those lists. Somebody asks, do you have any suggestions for similar books that you like in addition to your book that are that might be covering some of the same ground. I mean, I obviously read Chuck Moran's book, Confessions over Coffing Engineer. I held off reading his book until after I was done, getting to wanna. Leon, it's, there's some good stuff from there, Angie Schmidt's book. Right away. You know, to tell you the book, I really loved most recently, cause I, again, I held off reading all these books till after. I was finished writing mine, but Veronica Davis is inclusive transportation. It's not in the same vein. It's very different, but I found it to be really, really good. I love that book. Well, this's pretty amazing that you actually held off on reading some of these books. Were you worried that you might be duplicating efforts and did you think that you did like reading Chuck's book? And after I finished, I read Angie's book and Chuck's book sort of back to back and I was very happy that they went off in different directions. I mean, You know, there's some you know a little bit of overlap but I am glad I held off because I went down my own crazy way down different path. I'm happy with how it came out. So Hey, and I was definitely happy to see that they did something different. Hmm. A question from Paul. He said, please talk about the 5th E, which he says is equity. I've seen up to like 8, 9, 10 ease. So equity is important. I mean, especially in road safety, because we know their disparities in terms of our road safety outcomes that you know, lower income populations, minority populations. Have worse safety outcomes. And one of the things I mentioned in the book is that as a researcher, when I'm doing a paper that looks at those sort of issues, In terms of safety, I usually need to use a control variable and control for like income or education or percent minority. And the thinking is that those neighborhoods are just automatically less save. They Maybe drive less safe cars. So that controls for those sort of issues and I always have such a problem with that because we know full well when you look at the types of built environments we give to those populations versus others, they are very different. Like there's a street here in Denver near my neighborhood called Montview and through the Denver section. Where it's richer, it's whiter, it's a beautiful street with giant trees, with medians, with bike lanes, with amazing sidewalks that are set back from the road with big green space in between. As soon as you cross into the lower income neighborhood, it becomes a 4. Lane street instead of a 2 line street the bike lands go away the sidewalks shrink There's no more trees. Now you have that 2 way turning lane in the middle. So just to kind of look at those things and say that. To sort of blame those different populations for what they've been given, it's unfair to me. So we can definitely do a better job of accounting for equity. Not just in the outcomes, but in the pervision of transportation. Hi, I talked to a real estate agent that I knew would always like look in front of the house and see if there was a yellow line. And if there's a yellow line, automatically take a few $1,000 off the price of the house. Because, traffic would be moving faster in front of that. So you could go both ways. The design of the street. Might affect the value of the house and vice, vice, you know. Yeah, I was telling you earlier before we started to rob, like when I was here for CNN in 2,009, I knew I was moving here, so I was doing. House running trip during that same conference. I was taking all the tours and when I went around with a realtor and he was showing me a lot of houses on These major materials, I was like, oh, we don't even need to go in. Like, I'm not gonna buy this house. You go, maybe you'll love the inside. I'm like, it doesn't matter if I love the inside. I'm never gonna buy a house on a street like this. Like my focus is much more the neighborhood, the street than it is. The actual house. I'd rather have. Seemingly worse house in a better neighborhood street. And he really could not get this through his head. And he kept doing it like 3 or 4 times. He kept bringing me to these houses on these bigger materials. I'm like, oh my god, stop it. Yeah. So Marina Curios, what are the most progressive cities making the most revolutionary changes? We as planners need to have those examples to point to. It's hard, I think, for engineers though to kind of hear those things. Like a lot of times we point to you know, Amsterdam and Copenhagen in places like this and US engineers, like their eyes glaze over and they like, well, we're not them. And the same thing happens when I point out like Portland, Oregon or Boulder, Colorado. They're like, well, we're not bolder. Like, we can't do that. So I think you need to account for sort of. Culture to some extent. I did my sabbatical in Australia, 2,017. And even though Australia is doing a lot of the same things as European countries were doing. You guys engineers for whatever reason felt that we're maybe more culturally similar to Australia's when I show what they're doing they're like oh like maybe we could do that I think the same thing happens with a city like Denver Like we're doing things here on the street that I thought. Or a moonshot 10 years ago. And other cities like. You know, let's say you're like, you're Charlotte and if I tell you what Boulder's doing and like, yeah, we can't do that. But if I show you what Denver's doing, like, oh, maybe we can do that. So I think you just need to be careful. Instead of like pointing out which exact cities just try to think through Trying to find a city that is more of a match because there are a lot of cities doing good things that do that maybe would work better in terms of trying to get that those points across. What do you think about the Florida context sensitive, design guidelines or design? Rules, I guess. I, talk about those in the book a little bit. I know, I think it was at CNU in Louisville, like Billy Hatteray and I. Hosted one of the senior, they did a podcast series there. He and I hosted that one and I was sort of questioning it. I think a lot of new urbanists were thinking, oh, this is a great step in the right direction. At the same time. Like if you look at the design of the street, like they have like a bike lane. And they have the sidewalk there. They call this the clear zone. Like for a traffic engineer, what's the definition of a clear sign? Well, as the space we want Add a control drivers and cars to recover. And we're overlapping that space with where we want bikes and pads. Like to me that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Like we need to provide a safer place. So you know, it might be better than what they have. Before, but I still don't think it makes sense in terms of maybe the goals we're shooting for in terms of safety. Lawrence, our back, said, well, thank you, Wes, 1st of all, and you cover many baseless or poorly supported guidelines in the book. Do you feel that some are more useful for advocates to use. While others are more directed towards engineers to think about. I mean, thanks, Aljay. Good question. I mean, I try to write it in a way that could help both. I want to feel like I'm enlightening. The engineers and I'm sure some of the stuff they already know some of this stuff might be new to them. At the other end, I want to educate advocates the public planners people and other sort of sub disciplines that relate to this, to sort of give them enough information. Maybe ammunition is not the right word, but to be able to maybe effectively argue with an engineer. And maybe point out that you know, there isn't as much science or there isn't as much truth behind these things being standards or like the fact that they have a lot more leeway than maybe to make it seem to use engineering judgment. We get a question, how, how could you make a vision 0, Safe streets for all plans be better. There was, there was criticism of that, but how can they become effective? I mean, if you think big picture, like we know what we should do, like we should never allow a car to go over 20 in any place or might be pedestrians or bicyclists. Like we know how the data. Works in terms of the danger. But we're not willing to do that. So I even though the idea behind vision 0 is supposed to be a moral change. Like we're just not willing to do that. So we could do these things to make the roads safer. But a lot of times we won't. I mean, so there's a school like right off the federal boulevard, not too far from here. It's an elementary school. It's Like one block of a federal boulevard. And the school zone ends right behind Trader Boulevard. And that's the most dangerous street in this city. Yeah, we're just gonna be bothered to extend the. School zone through what is a street that we deemed too important for car traffic. Even though we know kids are crossing right at that crosswalk. Right next to it. I have pictures of them. You know, so it's part of its political will. Part of it is engineers fear reliability. And I show ways that I think engineers can get past that. But, it sort of all has to come together. It can't be any single one thing. We have Jennifer who's a traffic engineer and she said, As a traffic engineer, cares deeply about safety and is bought in on the thoughtful approaches you're talking about. She's concerned that we're going to lose people. In the traffic engineering industry. By outright blaming them and writing them off simply because their traffic engineers do have thoughts on how we can have these conversations. With our peers that leads them to change their minds. And join this movement. Well, you know, I last week goes up in Montana at the Mountain District IT. Transportation Engineering Conference. I sort of gave my 1st presentation on kind of some of these topics to a room full of transportation traffic engineers. And when they see it, when they hear me talk about like some of those examples of. Crashes that we blame on human error but are really something we need to be more self reflective about. They agree. Like it's hard for them not to. And I think There, it to me, it's an exciting time, not like one where we need to vilify them. And if you read the book, I'm not doing that. I'm despite the title. I'm trying to say it's not their fault. Like they're doing what they were given. They're doing what we were taught. But if we do shift to become more of an empirical science, there is so much new room for like me as a researcher for you as a practitioner to create better and safer places. So. It's an exciting time. I think part of it is we need a different. Type of engineer. I talk a little bit about how we need more generalists than specialists. We need people that can not only understand the design of a road, but how it impacts the communities around it or how it impacts. People that you know may have childcare or older adult dude like there needs to be bigger picture thinking. And by opening up sort of the gates and doors to transportation engineering to a broader set of people I think it's more opportunity than something that's gonna keep people away. Here's a topic that you really brought, talked a lot about in the book, but Tim asked can you speak to the impact of traffic impact analysis on poor roadway design? He's been involved in one or 2 that say to maintain an acceptable level of service, build a giant intersection with slip. Well, I talk about, I mean, it is a requirement for any sort of site engineering project you might do at the same time. Again, there is not much science behind like that being a need and for whatever reason. We don't ever ask for like a road impact safety analysis. Like what would be the difference in terms of safety outcomes if we do X versus Y versus Z. Since we don't know city ever asked for that. You know, university like mine ever teaches that. I mean, most traffic engineers would have a hard time even answering that question. So You know, part of it is like, you know, what gets measure gets managed and we're measuring capacity. We're measuring. Delay, we're measuring congestion, we're not often thinking about safety. We're not often thinking about something becoming a barrier for a kid getting to school or for whatever might be. So if we sort of ask the right questions, I think we'll get a much better chance of getting the right answers. Hannah in, Ann Arbor says that they have several strokes, including one. Like Washington Avenue. I'm sure of pronounce that correctly but it's controlled by M god and a bicyclist was hit this past Friday and is in critical condition as the state does not maintain the road and provide any safety features. Generally speaking, why does this state not allow the city to take of roads like this. What does this problem look like nationally? I know like when I was a consultant up in like New England there's a lot of sort of small New England town centers where a state highway runs through it. So they couldn't sort of do what they wanted to in terms of. The type of street that sort of looks like it could be a Norman Rockwell painting. But then you have a state highway running through it. There are a lot of places including in Colorado where the cities are taking over those roadways and with that comes taking over oftentimes the maintenance or the plowing or whatever it else it might be. So that is happening a lot of places at the same time to me there's no reason why these state Perfectized safety more than they do now. So, you know, just switching. Control to the cities. It feels again like a band-aid like we can do better. Like we can. Have the engineers at the state of Do's actually respect the context and the place where they're streets are because I mean a lot of our big streets should change their character as they get into a city. As they move through a city and then again as they lead the city. But it's a lot easier for an engineer to use the same cross section through that whole stretch. We can do better. Dustin Black, who appears to have read your book says one of his criticisms is the heavy reliance on traffic quarterly issues. Why was this to select the primary resource and do you think it is landing with the audience the way you intended? So the reason is I really wanted to get My information from like a 1st person voice instead of reading about people. Saying about what happened. I wanted to hear it from them themselves. So I was looking at what my options were for this. That was the main traffic engineering journal the time. I mean, I went through a lot of other resources, but that one, provided a great longitudinal look at what the traffic engineers were saying. Through sort of the importing years that I was looking at. So. You know, I think anytime you're pulling. Occurred in back on something like you need to kind of see the person on the other side like the image of the Wizard of Oz is powerful if you never see that it's just one man behind it. So I was trying to kind of point out. What was typically the men behind a lot of what we're doing. And Should to name them, call them by 1st name. Bring them out to the light and They wasn't really another way to do that. So that is sort of why. I went that direction. At the same time, in terms of whether it's landing or not, I mean, I You know, I did the best I could. I'm happy with the book. So hopefully. People, I mean, a lot of the feedback I'm getting, it's been super positive so that. It's good. So yeah, we'll see. Like what it becomes. I mean, if I would best case scenario, it's somewhere. Maybe not anywhere near Donald Trump's book in terms of impact in terms of long term impact, but. I try to write something that was more fundamental that wasn't just something that is useful today and will be useless in 2 years from now. I want something that you know, speaks to. The kind of bigger picture issues. That was my goal. We only have time for another really another question or so. but, You know, one, a couple of questions deal with fire marshals and they say, you know, how do you deal with fire marshals asking for 20 feet of asphalt? Will your next book be called Pilled by a Farm Marshal? It could be. I mean, I think I know, you know, some of the, engineers, I was talking to one that works for tool design and, you know, Denver last summer was putting in these sort of traffic circles. In in the neighborhoods like to help out with creating more of a network in terms of our bike ways. Things like that. They, he was telling me, I literally drew it on the pavement, like the circle and he had the fire truck come out and test it. So he has a video of them taking this corner. They ended up building it like the next day. And they built it in half a day. It was amazing how quickly they put that thing in. No, couple weeks later there were other fire officials. Complaining about this design asking them to rip it out and they're like, no, like, look, we tested your fire truck on it. So. Like letting them, it feels more like tactical urbanism, like letting them see it, letting them feel it, letting them try something like. And here's how narrow it could be. Here's how wide. I heard the same thing. I remember Elizabeth McDonald came to the CNU Transportation Summit in Boulder and she had just written the Boulevard book and one of the things she said is that on the Octavia Boulevard, the fire marshal after they had put it in they said we could have gone narrower on those access lines. And they were pushing for that earlier, but they fire marshal was against it until they actually used it and tried it. So Again, design is iterative and if we can test things and move in the right direction that That should work better. It seems to me that if the traffic engineers We're more on board with this that the farm marshals would be less of a of a barrier You know, it's it's difficult to getting through all of these barriers especially if the primary people who are designing the streets are not on board. If you look at the data, the percent of fires that most fire I know in Denver it was because 3% of the calls they come to or fires like far greater percentage are actually traffic crashes, right? So If we're building unsafe streets to help them. Can I get to fight? I don't know at the same time you look at any of the streets that were built before traffic engineers ever came along. Like including like acorn street in Boston that you saw at the very beginning before I put my presentation up. If there's a fire there, the fire trucks gonna figure out a way to get there and that happens in every city. All those old neighborhoods where the streets are too narrow. Given our current guidelines. The fire trucks get there. Well, West this has been a pleasure. I do we have to call it to. call an end to this, but I'm gonna remind folks that the, this will be on you YouTube or we will, it'll be posted on the CNN website and YouTube probably within a day. We have plenty more questions to answer. I wish we could get to them. Maybe would it be possible for to send send some of these to you and see if you could answer them? In time. Sure, I'm also doing a Reddit, ask me anything on Thursday, so people are welcome to join that, and ask me questions there too. Okay, well thank you very much West. This was great. Thanks for everybody for attending and the great conversation. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, everybody.
