"Improvements"
Yesterday, the latest book in the Strong Towns series, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, was released everywhere books are sold. You can pick up your copy here, but in the meantime, we’d like to give you a sneak preview of the first chapter (in slightly modified format).
Image via Unsplash.
Biased Language
As an engineer, I have worked on any number of improvement projects. I’ve improved roads. I’ve improved streets. I’ve improved parking lots, frontage roads, and alleys. Like King Midas, everything I and my fellow engineers work on, we seem to improve.
At least that is how we describe what we do. As I write this, my city is seeking bids for what they say in the official notice is a “street improvement project.” It does not seem like an improvement to me, nor to many people who unsuccessfully fought against it, yet formally it is called an improvement.
The project involves the widening of a residential street. The many young families who live there believe that the changes will dramatically increase automobile speeds, which already seem too fast. To widen the street, quite a few mature trees will be removed, and the city has acquired part of the front yards of many of these neighbors, often against their will. To add insult to injury, to help fund the project, these aggrieved property owners are being forced to pay the city a special assessment fee of thousands of dollars. This is the kind of experience that makes my “Conversation with an Engineer” video seem universal.
What makes this project an improvement? In my eyes, it is a diminishment. Yet, from beginning to end, it has been presented by the city engineer as an improvement project. The subtle bias of this language provides another glimpse at the values embedded within the engineering profession.
From the perspective of the design professional, the current street is “substandard” because, given the design speed the professional has chosen and the number of vehicles they want to accommodate, it does not meet the recipe in the design cookbook. The way to “fix” the “substandard” street is to “improve” it to be consistent with the recipe.
This is merely a reinforcement of the underlying values already discussed, but in a way that manipulates the conversation in favor of the engineer’s perspective. Who would want something to be substandard? Who could possibly be against improving things? Yet, obviously, whether a project makes things better depends entirely on a person’s perspective.
Instead of a “street improvement project,” why not just call it a “street project.” Or, if we need an adjective, how about a “street modification project.” If the profession is free of values, as its practitioners claim, such a change in language should not be the least bit threatening.
The same goes for the word “enhancement.” For example, when we “enhance the clear zone,” what we really mean is that we are removing all of the trees within a certain distance of the roadway edge. This may indeed be an enhancement to the person wanting to drive quickly through that area, but it may also be a huge diminishment for the person who uses those trees as a sound and visual buffer between their home and the traffic. Why don’t we just say, “remove the trees?”
I think the reason is abundantly clear. For the design professional with speed of travel as the highest value, removing the trees from alongside the road is an enhancement. It allows traffic to move at higher speeds. In the eyes of the traffic engineer, “remove the trees” focuses on a negative, and “enhance the clear zone” focuses on a positive, all while being an equally valid yet still value-free, description.
Even deeply technical terms like “Level of Service” are projections of the underlying value system. When evaluating the performance of a street using Level of Service, the traffic engineer will consider how well things are operating from the perspective of the driver. The street is then given a grade, like an academic course, with “A” being the best and “F” signifying failure. Level of Service A means that traffic flows freely with no hinderance, while Level of Service F merely means that travel time for the driver is not predictable.
Never mind that Level of Service A is often horrific for people trying to cross a street on foot. And never mind that a high level of service generally means a lower level of financial productivity for the community (higher costs, lower financial return), especially on local streets. . For the engineer that who values traffic speed above all else, there is no conflict in using this grading system to prioritize “improvements.”
When engineers do not recognize their own values and how they are being projected in the words they use, we must do that for them by correcting their language to remove the bias.
Understanding the Bias
One of my colleagues who has repeatedly done that is Ian Lockwood. Ian is a transportation engineer with Toole Design, one of the country’s leading engineering firms working outside of the current transportation paradigm. His work on changing the language within the profession has inspired and informed me and many others. In a 2017 essay for the ITE Journal, he wrote the following:
The field of transportation engineering and planning has its own biased language. Much of the technical vocabulary regarding transportation and traffic engineering was developed between 1910 and 1965. The foreword of the Highway Capacity Manual, first published in 1965, states, “Knowledgeable professionals, acting in concert, have provided the value judgements needed to…and have established the common vocabulary…”
Notice the acknowledgment of making “value judgments” and the purposeful development of a “common vocabulary.” The period prior to 1965 was the golden age of the automobile in the United States. Automobiles were equated to freedom, mobility, and success. Accommodating automobiles at high speeds became a major priority in society and, thus, a major priority for the transportation engineering profession. It is no coincidence that these values were built into the transportation vocabulary.
While civil engineering itself is one of the oldest professions, with techniques and insights dating back thousands of years, the sub-specialty of traffic engineering is very young. Some of its earliest practitioners are still alive today. This was an entirely new pursuit, developed on the fly, in a period of tumultuous change.
Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, the United States desperately needed a program that would keep the economy going. While the war had created jobs and economic output, demobilization threatened to shift the economy right back into depression. The redirection of American industry and capital from war-making into suburbanization created a kinetic growth machine that fueled a postwar boom.
We built a new version of America, one centered around the automobile, transforming an entire continent in a generation. Traffic engineers were tasked with making transportation in this newly imagined approach work. To do that, they needed to standardize nearly every component of this system so that it could be recreated, at scale and with urgency, across a vast continent. It is difficult to understate overstate how monumental an undertaking this was, nor how astounding their success was in accomplishing it.
In those early days, significant gain in travel speed could be achieved merely by improving driving surfaces and roadway conditions. With new highways connecting distant places, an increase in speed also meant an increase in overall mobility; people could reach more places with the same amount of time investment. Distances previously unheard of were now being routinely traveled by millions of Americans. Under these conditions, focusing on increasing speed was an easy proxy for increasing mobility.
In the decades immediately after World War II, it was increased mobility that was driving economic growth. Whether it was families living in new housing in the suburbs, the ability of employees to switch jobs more easily, or the capacity for farmers, loggers, and miners to get their materials to distant markets, the fact that Americans could reach more places in less time provided accelerating levels of prosperity.
This notion became a self-evident truth embedded within the traffic engineering profession. Out of it sprung many beliefs that are now orthodoxy. These include the following:
Faster speeds are better than slower speeds.
Access to distant locations by automobile is more important than access to local destinations by walking or biking.
Accommodating a full range of movement for large vehicles is more important than minimizing construction costs and increasing safety for people walking.
At intersections, minimizing delay for automobile traffic is more important than minimizing delay for people walking or biking.
Economic growth is a greater priority than community wealth preservation or financial productivity.
Today, the American transportation system is fully mature. We finished building the interstate system over four decades ago. The easy mobility gains have long been tapped. We are now left almost exclusively with expensive modifications that provide comparably modest changes in travel time, a theoretical benefit that is quickly denuded by shifting traffic patterns. To the extent that it once was, designing for speed is no longer a proxy for increasing mobility.
Yet these core insights of the early profession persist. Take the case of Destiny Gonzalez, a 7-year-old girl who was killed while crossing State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, with her mother Sagrario Gonzalez. State Street was designed for speeds far in excess of what is even legal there. The entire street is built to favor commuters driving into Springfield from distant locations in the morning and departing in the opposite direction at the end of the workday, prejudicing the person who lives close to the downtown and commutes on foot in the process. This is not only dangerous, but it has also had a disastrous impact on property values within the core of the city.
The lane widths, recovery areas, and turning radii at the intersections are designed for the ease of large vehicles, even though they are infrequent, and even though this design makes State Street more dangerous for drivers at non-peak times, and more dangerous at all times for people walking and biking. Each intersection where assistance to cross the street is provided, the burden of delay is shifted away from the driver on State Street and to the person walking, even at the hour when Sagrario Gonzalez was making her decision on where to cross.
We cannot in good conscious conscience blame Sagrario Gonzalez for the tragedy that occurred on State Street. She was navigating a space that was, at best, indifferent to her and the children’s safety. At worst, it was outright hostile. It remains that way to this day, as do most local streets in the United States.
We can be generous in our interpretation of history and thereby more understanding of how the traffic engineering profession came by its core set of values. Even so, these values must be acknowledged if only so that they can be consciously set aside in favor of a more modern and universal set of human values.
Read the rest of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by ordering your copy today!
Traffic studies read like dry, technocratic products that follow some scientific process. In reality, they often use selective data and unrealistic projections to promote road projects with the veneer of technical expertise.