I found this to be informative. -india
--- Begin Message --- Title: Schenk Atwood Starkweather Yahara Neighborhood Public Mailing List
Messages In This Digest (1 Message)
- 1.
- On Streets From: Twink Jan-McMahon
Message
- 1.
On Streets
Posted by: "Twink Jan-McMahon" [email protected] tjanmcmahon
Tue Nov 30, 2010 7:32 pm (PST)
I thought this might be of interest. Interesting engineering insights.
Forwarded from the Sustainable Atwood listserv.
Special thanks to both neighbors and Madison City engineers working to make
our streets outside of the book.
--Twink
----------
To Whom it May Concern (from Grist):
WRONG WAY
Confessions of a recovering engineer
by Charles Marohn 22 Nov 2010 1:26 PM
Road widening is what engineers are taught to do for safety. Problem is, it
makes things more dangerous.Cross-posted from Strong Towns.
After graduating from college with a civil engineering degree, I found
myself working in my home town for a local engineering firm doing mostly
municipal engineering (roads, sewer pipe, water pipe, stormwater). A fair
percentage of my time was spent convincing people that, when it came to
their road, I knew more than they did.
And of course I should know more. First, I had a technical degree from a top
university. Second, I was in a path towards getting a state license (at the
time I was an engineer in training, the four-year "apprenticeship" required
to become a fully licensed professional engineer), which required me to pass
a pretty tough test just to get started and another, more difficult, exam to
conclude. Third, I was in a profession that is one of the oldest and most
respected in human history, responsible for some of the greatest
achievements of mankind. Fourth -- and most important -- I had books and
books of standards to follow.
A book of standards to an engineer is better than a bible to a priest. All
you have to do is to rely on the standards. Back in college I was told a
story about how, in WWII, some Jewish engineers in hiding had run thousands
of tedious tests on asphalt, just to produce these graphs that we still use
today. Some of our craft descends from Roman engineers who did all of this a
couple of millennia ago. How could I be wrong with literally thousands of
years of professional practice on my side?
And, more to the point, what business would I -- let alone a property owner
on a project I was working on -- have in questioning the way things were
done? Of course the people who wrote the standards knew better than we did.
That is why they wrote the standard.
When people would tell me that they did not want a wider street, I would
tell them that they had to have it for safety reasons.
When they answered that a wider street would make people drive faster and
that would be seem to be less safe, especially in front of their house where
their kids were playing, I would confidently tell them that the wider road
was more safe, especially when combined with the other safety enhancements
the standards called for.
When people objected to those other "enhancements", like removing all of the
trees near the road, I told them that for safety reasons we needed to
improve the sight distances and ensure that the recovery zone was free of
obstacles.
When they pointed out that the "recovery zone" was also their "yard" and
that their kids played kickball and hopscotch there, I recommended that they
put up a fence, so long as the fence was outside of the right-of-way.
When they objected to the cost of the wider, faster, treeless road that
would turn their peaceful front yard into the viewing area for a drag strip
unless they built a concrete barricade along their front property line, I
informed them that progress was sometimes expensive, but these standards
have been shown to work across the state, the country, and the world, and I
could not compromise with their safety.
In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster,
treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking
highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even
county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly
reason why an engineer would ever design a 14-foot lane for a city block,
yet we do it continually. Why?
The answer is utterly shameful: Because that is the standard.
In the engineering profession's version of defensive medicine, we can't
recommend standards that are not in the manual. We can't use logic to vary
from a standard that gives us 60 mph design speeds on roads with
intersections every 200 feet. We can't question why two cars would need to
travel at high speed in opposite directions on a city block, let alone why
we would want them to. We can yield to public pressure and post a speed
limit -- itself a hazard -- but we can't recommend a road section that is
not in the highway manual.
When the public and politicians tell engineers that their top priorities are
safety and then cost, the engineer's brain hears something completely
different. The engineer hears, "Once you set a design speed and handle the
projected volume of traffic, safety is the top priority. Do what it takes to
make the road safe, but do it as cheaply as you can." This is why engineers
return projects with asinine "safety" features, like pedestrian bridges and
tunnels that nobody will ever use, and costs that are astronomical.
An engineer designing a street or road prioritizes the world in this way, no
matter how they are instructed:
Traffic speed
Traffic volume
Safety
Cost
The rest of the world generally would prioritize things differently, as
follows:
Safety
Cost
Traffic volume
Traffic speed
In other words, the engineer first assumes that all traffic must travel at
speed. Given that speed, all roads and streets are then designed to handle a
projected volume. Once those parameters are set, only then does an engineer
look at mitigating for safety and, finally, how to reduce the overall cost
(which at that point is nearly always ridiculously expensive).
In America, it is this thinking that has designed most of our built
environment, and it is nonsensical. In many ways, it is professional
malpractice. If we delivered what society asked us for, we would build our
local roads and streets to be safe above all else. Only then would we
consider what could be done, given our budget, to handle a higher volume of
cars at greater speeds.
We go to enormous expense to save ourselves small increments of driving
time. This would be delusional in and of itself if it were not also making
our roads and streets much less safe. I'll again reference a 2005 article
from the APA Journal showing how narrower, slower streets dramatically
reduce accidents, especially fatalities.
And it is that simple observation that all of those supposedly "ignorant"
property owners were trying to explain to me, the engineer with all the
standards, so many years ago. When you can't let your kids play in the yard,
let alone ride their bike to the store, because you know the street is
dangerous, then the engineering profession is not providing society any real
value. It's time to stand up and demand a change.
It's time we demand that engineers build us Strong Towns.
Charles Marohn is a professional engineer licensed in Minnesota and the
president of the nonprofit organization Strong Towns.
Gloom and doom with a sense of humor®.
©2010. Grist Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved.
Need to Reply?Click one of the "Reply" links to respond to a specific message in the Daily Digest.
MARKETPLACE![Yahoo! Groups]()
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Individual | Switch format to Traditional
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe![]()
--- End Message ---
_______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
