BONUS: Engineering streets like freeways
S1: We're signaling the wrong things to drivers. We're signaling to drivers that this is a simple environment like a highway. And so you don't have to pay really rigid , close attention. And most of the time that's very true. But in these random occurrences where things are not where we expect them to be , tragedy occurs and it occurs far too often.
S2: From Kpbs in San Diego , This is Freeway Exit. I'm Andrew Bowen. On today's bonus episode , we're bringing back an interview I did in 2021 with Chuck Maron. He's the founder and president of the nonprofit Strong Towns. Moran spoke to me while he was promoting his book , Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The main argument is that a lot of the problems we have with our transportation system have their roots in the field of engineering problems like car dependence , greenhouse gas emissions and an alarming rise in traffic fatalities. He says engineers are great at building infrastructure , but they're not so great at building communities. And too often they apply the principles and design standards of freeways to local streets with sometimes deadly consequences. Now , here's where I have to say. If you're a first time listener , welcome. So glad you found us. And once you're done listening to this episode , go back and start listening from episode one. This theme of engineers and the outsized role they've played in designing our transportation system comes up a lot. Here my interview with Chuck Maron after a short break. We're back , and here's my interview with Chuck Maron , author , engineer and founder and president of the nonprofit Strong Towns. So you chose to title your book , Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.
S1: I mean , really , when you become a civil engineer , when you become a municipal engineer and you start doing things like traffic and sewer and water and all that stuff , there's a certain approach that is given to you that you inherit. You're given a book of standards. You're given like , you know , the best practices of a profession , and you have this expectation to follow that , particularly if you want to get ahead. And so for me , there was a certain kind of mystique that came with joining this profession and learning those things and adopting them as like the way things should be , that I had to unlearn , that I really had to go through and get out of my brain. And so that's what I'm recovering from. I'm recovering from a system that was given to me that I adopted wholehearted , that I had to , since unlearn and deprogram my brain from.
S2: Throughout your book , you keep returning to this one particularly horrific crash that happened on December 3rd , 2014 , in Springfield , Massachusetts. Tell us what happened there.
S1: Yeah , a mom with two little girls was leaving the library in Springfield , Massachusetts , late at night. There's a got a great Dr. Seuss section in the library. They walked out the front door and they did what literally dozens of people do every day. I sat on this place the day that day in the morning and watch people walk back and forth. They crossed the street , headed to the parking lot , which is directly across this four lane highway that's been built through the middle of the city. They did this in kind of the most natural of ways , and a car came along , struck them , put the one girl in the hospital and then killed seven year old Destinee Gonzalez. This has happened many times at this location. And in fact , we're speaking today on November 12th , 2021 , on November 11th. Yesterday , one of the employees of the library walked out. The library was walking across the street in this exact same location to get in her car. And she was struck and killed in the same spot. And so this is an intersection that or this is a crossing that has a long history of taking lives and a long history of mismatch between the design of the street and the goals and objectives of the engineer in this case and the health and safety of this community.
S2: You dig into so many of the different aspects of this particular location and the corridor of State Street , where it's located that you think contributed to this really tragic death of a seven year old girl. Name some of those things.
S1: And because it's designed as a corridor to move cars quickly , it draws upon all of the kind of engineering knowledge of how to build highways , Understand where this is. This is a city street in a neighborhood , a neighborhood that really predates even the the 1800s in terms of its original conception , but but was fully developed in an age when people walked. So all the neighborhoods are designed to be walkable. All the places are , you know , within walking distance. And and this is a population that today is on the on the other end of the poverty spectrum. There's a lot of impoverished people living in this downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. And a very low percentage of them are auto owners. So a lot of them walk to everywhere they go and imposed on this neighborhood where you have a lot of people walking and a lot of people who have no other alternative to walk is this street that has been converted into a high speed traffic corridor against the wishes of the neighborhood , against the wishes of the people who are there , all in a like a short sighted attempt to try to appeal to development out on the edge and people who may , you know , drive in to the center of the city and like shower it with some kind of love and affection before leaving as quickly as possible. It's a really bad economic development strategy. It's a really bad community development strategy. It's brutally expensive to build , and it has just all kinds of negative impacts on the people who actually live in the core of Springfield.
S2: A lot of these aspects that make a street very unsafe or inhospitable for pedestrians I learned from your book are actually designed to be safe. At least from the perspective of an old school traffic engineer.
S1: You widen out the lanes , you add in recovery areas , you add in clear zones , you basically create a lot of buffer so that the driver of the vehicle has a lot of room to react to. Things that might happen , has a lot of spacing. And basically you give them a lot of reaction time and room you from a design standpoint , forgive the mistakes that a driver would make by creating all this buffer. When you bring that mindset into an urban area , what happens is that urban areas are full of complexity. They're full of automobiles. You know , that's randomly stop or turn or cut across traffic. You have cars entering and exiting the driving stream all the time. You have particularly in this area in Springfield , you have people walking , people walking across the street in crosswalks , not in crosswalks. You have people on bikes , you have people in wheelchairs. You have the dog that gets loose and runs across the street. You have the kid who chases the kickball. So you have all this complexity and simultaneous that complexity. What you have done with the street design is actually signal to drivers , We've got your back. We have provided you with lots of buffer room , with lots of capacity , so you can anticipate things that might happen , you can anticipate and react to it. You've got all kinds of safety factor. And the reality is , is that is the wrong message to send to drivers because what drivers do in in an urban area , when you give them lots of room , is they speed up and they speed up not because they're deviants or not because they're horrible people or not because they don't care , but because driving is a an activity that from a cognitive standpoint , you don't hard focus on. It's actually what's called a system , one activity that you do just almost involuntarily without really thinking. And we've just we're signaling the wrong things to drivers. We're signaling to drivers that this is a simple environment like a highway. And so you don't have to pay really rigid , close attention. And most of the time that's very true. But in these random occurrences where things are not where we expect them to be , tragedy occurs and it occurs far too often.
S2: You open your book with a scene from earlier in your career. It's actually sort of not an actual conversation that happened , but a sort of composite of many different conversations you had with residents who you were meeting with to go over plans to , in this particular case , widen a road that's right in front of their home. And this person you're meeting with isn't too happy with it. They have a lot of questions for you.
S1: I mean , I made a video of this. It's called Conversation with an Engineer , and it's been watched like 400,000 times or something like that.
S3: I heard you are planning to improve my street.
S4: We also plan to enhance the clear zone in order to bring the street up to an acceptable and safe standard.
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S3: What does that mean.
S4: With a.
S1: Boring video ? Yet all kinds of people have watched it because it describes a situation that many , many , many of us have experienced and engineer coming out having a street project. They are doing , presenting it as kind of de facto. This is the way I'm here to answer your questions and essentially have a dialogue. But the dialogue is very one way. Here's why we're doing this. Here's why we're doing that. I'm sorry. It will affect you , but I wouldn't play in your front yard if I were you. I wouldn't walk across the street. It wouldn't be safe , like , you know , and what you get out of it. And I think the most the most eye opening part of this is that the engineer actually talks themselves into a self justifying circle. They start off , you know , with with with one explanation. And by the end of the conversation , their explanation , you know , justifies the initial set of conditions. It's , you know , we have to build the street because of traffic. Well , traffic is coming because of the new development we're having , what we're doing , new development , so we can afford to fix the street. And it is this kind of crazy situation where the individual in this case a woman , you know , Avatar , you know , asking these very simple questions , has it right in their gut. They know something is wrong. But the impenetrable kind of , you know , barrier that the engineers put around them to protect them. Themselves with codes and standards and practices and and beliefs. Is just impenetrable for the person. And it becomes painful to watch.
S2: Still ahead , Chuck Marone explains why he thinks cities and the people who live in them have to embrace congestion. I'm Andrew Bohn and this is Freeway Exit. One of the themes in this book , I think , is the fact that street design has gotten undemocratic. You have traffic engineers with a very high level of technical knowledge and training , making decisions about how many lanes a street should have , how wide the lanes should be , where crosswalks are necessary. And sometimes elected officials who are the , you know , technically in charge of the government don't always have an easy time getting those people to make changes.
S1: And let me let me say it like this. I feel like the framing is a complicated versus complex framing , and there's a little more nuance to it because I don't necessarily think that like , street design should be put up to a vote like , you know , or that everybody who lives in a neighborhood should have a veto power over what we do , you know ? But what we've done is we've taken complex urban environments and we've imposed on them through the street design process a very like rigid set of orthodoxies that are complicated , but they're not complex. They don't respond to all the local nuance , adapt , change , evolve over time. They're very rigid. So your street in front of your house , my street in front of my house would both be subject to the manual , manual and uniform traffic control devices , as would the street two blocks over in a commercial area , as would the street with nobody on it. There's a rigid orthodoxy that is applied , that is unable to , and we can call it undemocratic or , you know , what have you , but unable to respond in an adaptive way to the nuances of a neighborhood. If we look at Springfield , where we started this conversation , there is a neighborhood with a high level of poverty , a high degree of people without vehicles and a high degree of walking. The design for that street should be very , very , very different than what you get three miles out on the edge of Springfield , where most people own a car. Most people are commuters. Most people drive everywhere they go. Yet as an engineering profession , we have created this like , rigid orthodoxy of street design , where we focus on the traffic flow of the automobile as opposed to the environment in which we're designing in. And that's where I think you get a reaction that feels undemocratic. I would say it's non responsive , which is really more of a reflection of us trying to take this really complex thing and simplify it down to 1 or 2 variables. How do we move a high volume of traffic at speed ? Streets are more complex than that.
S2: So for for the sake of conversation , let's stick with this sort of binary of democratic or undemocratic , because I think a lot of elected officials want to believe that the process should be democratic and that regular people should be involved in these types of decisions. However , I can't tell you how many times I've witnessed plans to improve pedestrian safety , improve bike safety or access to public transit. All those plans get watered down or sometimes abandoned altogether because you've got residents in that neighborhood who don't want them to happen. And typically they're just concerned about congestion getting worse , parking being harder to find. And so when that's the case in our attempts at sort of making street design more collaborative with regular people , when that leads to worse outcomes from the perspective of pedestrian safety , which should be our goal.
S1: And I feel like our response to that problem has been to try to make things quote unquote , more democratic. And I feel like that's the wrong approach. It's kind of why I pushed back on it. I just got back from a trip to California and Oregon and these are places that , you know , in all of the US have probably the most democratic in terms of , you know , 50% plus one responsiveness to the public. But but probably the most out of alignment with the public in terms of its actual like implementation of things they they can do. They can get 50% plus one to make the $500 million bus rapid transit investment in this place. But they can't like organize around putting in a crosswalk if it would slow traffic down by 2%. This to me is democracy like scaled to the wrong. It's applied at the wrong scale. When we talk to people , everybody wants traffic on their local neighborhood street to be slow and respect them and respect their kids and respect their neighborhood and their neighbors. But everybody wants to be able to when they get to the next. Neighborhood over , get quickly to the place they want to be. And so if you do , like put up a Democratic vote to something , that's what you will get. You will get the person from the next neighborhood coming over and arguing , we shouldn't make this street safe because or they won't say it that way , but they'll say we shouldn't slow down traffic because I got to get through here to get to my place of work. But if you go then to their neighborhood , everyone will come over to that one. And when they're trying to do something and say , You can't do that , it's the it's the Waze problem in a way. You know , the app , everybody likes Waze when they're trying to get somewhere , but not when it brings traffic through their neighborhood. What we really need to do to get around this this problem is make our street design process and really our whole local government more horizontally responsive. Streets need to be designed block by block by block , or at the very least , like neighborhood by neighborhood , with the values of building productive places , actually building wealth within a place as being our primary motivation. How we how do we build great places where people want to live , places where people want to be in , where humans outside of an automobile are thriving in that environment. And in that sense , the throughput of traffic becomes a far less concern and engineers actually become like supporters to a process. You know , one technical skill among many that are brought to bear as opposed to like the ones who are doing the project and allowing all of us to have a comment on it. I think our street design process needs to become much more bottom up , and I don't necessarily equate that with democratic , but I do equate it with a horizontal orientation around where people struggle as opposed to a vertical orientation around a policy objective of moving vehicles quickly and balancing that in some type of superficial way with public input.
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S1: I see. I see a lot of places that want to do things differently , and then they run up against the rules and regulations and the ones that are very dogmatic about like what the rules and regulations are , they get stuck at that point. They struggle. They're like , Well , we can't do that because dot , dot , dot or we can't do this because dot , dot , dot. And the ones that thrive are the ones not that say , well , throw out the rulebook and , you know , be careless and like , who really cares ? They are like , okay , here's an obstacle we've run up against. How do we get around this obstacle ? How do we find a local adaptation to this ? And a lot of times that involves changing staff. A lot of times that involves , you know , creating a different channel for where this workflow would go. But a lot of times it just requires us to sit down and collaborate. I'm worried about liability. Okay , how do we document this in a way where we can express the intent and why we think this is a better approach from a public health safety standpoint and get that done ? Well , okay , we can bring in our city attorney and we can do that and we can come up with a different way of of doing this and framing this. The cities that don't take can't it can't be done for an answer are the ones that I see doing the most , you know , incredible things , really.
S2: San Diego has set some very ambitious goals with cutting back on driving its adopted a Vision Zero goal to end all traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2025. It recently or is in the process of updating its Climate Action plan , which calls for half of all trips in the city to be made via biking , walking or public transit by 2035. But I don't think city leaders have a very clear picture of how they're going to get there , exactly how they'll accomplish that.
S1: Number one , congestion as a problem would need to just go away. People would have to accept congestion as not a problem , but as actually a manifestation of the system that we've built a system that needs to change. If you're going to meet those goals. And you would actually have to embrace congestion for what it is , which is a sign of demand for local alternatives and by local alternatives. That kind of gets to the second part , which is in order to. Each of these goals , which I think are very good goals , very worthy goals. What you need to have is not a transportation approach. You need to have a neighborhood development approach because to get to that goal requires people to have alternatives near them that they can walk to , alternatives near them that they can bike to. It doesn't you're not going to get there by taking the the strode environment that you've created today or the highway environment you've created today. And like appendage , a trail on the side of it or , you know , appendage like an overpass to get people to walk over , that's not that's not the way it's going to work. The only way you get to that goal is to actually build neighborhoods , neighborhoods where people can replace their longer distance trips with local trips. So I need milk , I need bread , I need to get my hair cut. I need to do whatever basic like thing I do on a typical day. That's got to be there has to be an alternative for that locally. It doesn't mean you can't get in your car and drive to the big box grocer , but it means that you can also get that trip done locally and so you can balance those objectives. Do I want to spend half an hour in traffic congestion ? Do I want to pay $0.10 more for milk ? That's a fair trade off choice that people are not being presented with today. If you want to get to a point where people can walk and bike at scale , it actually has to be a neighborhood development strategy first and a transportation strategy second , as opposed to the other way around.
S2: So many of the problems that you diagnose in this book are really with the engineering profession itself , the values , the culture , the educational curriculum.
S1: Like they literally I think a lot of times we're paralyzed and we think , well , we need a big we need a big program from the state to do this or we need a big federal push to do this , or we need the engineering profession to somehow change. And the reality is , is that you need none of those things. Any city that wants to change right now can do it despite all of those other rigid structures not changing within. And I think as soon as we get to the point where enough places are doing that , enough places are taking the initiative on their own , engineers will adapt to this. I mean , I do this thing when I go out and speak in places where I go through the design process and the way that engineers approach street design and they approach it from a standpoint of , you know , what is the design speed , what is the volume of traffic , what is the manual say that say is safe , and then how much is this cost ? And I had people go through and identify their own values and it's the reciprocal of the design approach that we have. The reality is , is I've done that with groups of engineers and they're also the reciprocal. So the way engineers go about designing streets is not actually the way most of them would do it if they were given the freedom to actually practice engineering and not just rigidly apply a standard orthodoxy that have been given to them. And so I think as soon as the profession grasp that , that they can they can make more money doing better projects , creating more value for their community at less cost per project and actually be engineers. I think that a lot of them will get on board and find this to be a really productive way to practice their calling.
S2: I'm wondering if you'll do a lightning round with me. I give you go for it. I give you a particular feature , something to do with street or infrastructure , and you tell me , is it good ? Is it bad ? And you can qualify it with a brief description of why you think so. Okay. Yep.
S1: Yep. Go for it.
S2: Beg buttons , which for anyone who doesn't know are those buttons you have to press to trigger a pedestrian cross signal.
S1: Oh my gosh. This is so horrible and demeaning it. If you're building a place where you expect people to cross the street , you should design it for people to cross the street with automobile throughput as an afterthought.
S2: One way streets.
S1: If they're used in terms of moving traffic , like increasing mobility , wretched , horrible , never used them. If they're used as a design feature to actually slow down traffic and and build a better place , then I think they can work really well.
S2: Red light cameras and other types of automated traffic enforcement.
S1: I reject them wholly unless they're done after a street redesign process. They should be used to catch deviants , people who are , you know , destructive and doing endangering others. But as just a way to say like , here's our bad street design. Let's overcome this with a red light camera. It's just like predatory government. It's the worst of all worlds medians. Uh , it depends on where they're at.
S5: I mean.
S2:
S1: And when they're paired with , like , calm traffic and like , a refuge for people to cross. They're absolutely wonderful. So often , though , they're just designed as like a way to separate traffic , to keep everything moving much more quickly.
S2:
S1: I love them. They're fun , you know ? And I think , you know , when you're talking like mobility in a place , anything you can do that allows people to access more options from their place without getting into an automobile should be looked at as a net good.
S2: Autonomous vehicles.
S1: Way too much hype for what they actually would provide. I mean , right now , we could deploy autonomous vehicles on interstates between cities and they would save lots of lives and they would be really great. We can't do it and we won't do it because we're insisting that autonomous vehicles be able to operate at the neighborhood level. And they can't. And they won't until we lower speeds. And if we had speeds that were 15 , 20 miles an hour , autonomous vehicles would work just fine. But the reality is , is if we had speeds that we wouldn't need autonomous vehicles because humans can operate them just fine and safe at that speed.
S2: Ride hailing apps like Uber and Lyft.
S1: Uh , I find them to be convenient. I feel like they're again , if we can allow people to live without a vehicle , we actually change and transform a neighborhood. And so I feel like Uber and Lyft and what have you are like gateway drugs to better places.
S2: Stop signs.
S1: Uh , why ? I mean , I there are places where there there are a good temporary Band-Aid to help. But the reality is , is we should be able to navigate cities at slow enough speeds where stop signs are just inoperative or unnecessary.
S2: That was me speaking with Chuck Maron , founder and president of Strong Towns , about his book , Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. Before you go , I have a bit of a news update. The last bonus episode we brought you was an interview I did with Hassan , the top transportation official in San Diego County , and he said some pretty provocative things about freeways and their potential to be repurposed and reimagined for the 21st century. Three days after that episode dropped , news broke that Akron is resigning. The timing was a coincidence. I can't take credit for it. But this is big news for San Diego. If you want to learn more about it , head over to the Kpbs Roundtable podcast. Some other local journalists and I unpack what Akron his legacy is and what his departure means for the future of our freeways. Freeway exit is produced by me , Andrew Bowen and is edited by Brooke Ruth. We don't have a real marketing budget , so if you like this podcast and you want to get the word out about it , tell your friends. Word of mouth is a really , really powerful tool to help us reach new audiences. You can also leave us a rating and review and your favorite podcast app. And of course you can support this work by making a donation at org. You can also get a freeway exit T-shirt for a donation of $5 a month. Thanks for listening.
