“Killed by a Traffic Engineer”

Wes Marshall

If we need to constantly remind people in the transportation system to be safe, is it really a safe transportation system?

As someone who works in a field other than traffic engineering, I’m not quite the target audience of this book. There’s a lot of citations that I didn’t bother looking at, and detailed discussions of the various 1,000–page guidebooks that, presumably, every traffic engineer owns and nobody else has ever heard of. But I still found it a very interesting read; it’s basically a takedown of the current state of the field.

It’s 88 chapters long, and the majority of them are devoted to taking a “standard practice” and showing how thin the evidence backing it is. It’s more than a little disturbing to know how much of our road design is based on a single study from 60 years ago with a limited dataset and nary an attempt at replication… and which only sorta addresses the topic that became the standard. And those are the better cases! As a “fun” example, consider those retroreflective road stripes: on rural highways, it sure seems like having stripes marking the outside of the roadway, and not just the division between travel lanes, would make the road more visible and thus safer, right? Bad news, that vibes-based approach isn’t even what it’s based on; safety studies showed adding them actually increased the crash rate.

There’s a lot of that sort of thing in this book. I think my only edit I’d make is adding an 89th chapter at the end; the last three chapters are the “call to action” portion, but said calls to action are directed almost entirely at traffic engineers. Maybe throw in another one for people like me, who don’t work in the field but want to help improve things; I could use a few tips on what sorts of public comment meetings I should be attending, and what questions I should ask.

Overall, an interesting read; check it out.1