I Analyze Streets for a Living, and I Still Didn’t See What Was Right in Front of Me

Most of us move through the world without really seeing it. That is not necessarily carelessness. It is how our brains work. We become familiar with a place, recognize patterns, and begin filling in the details. The street we drive every morning becomes “the street to work.” The intersection becomes “the four-way stop.” The sidewalk, curb, signs, driveways, parked cars, and utility poles recede into the background.

We see enough to function, but observation asks something different of us. It requires interrupting that autopilot and looking at what is actually there.

There is an important difference between seeing and noticing. Seeing is passive. Our eyes receive whatever is in front of them. Noticing is active. It requires us to stop, pay attention, and eventually ask questions about what we see.

That sounds simple, but I have learned through my work as an urban designer that it can be remarkably difficult, especially for those of us who have spent our careers working with the built environment. Sometimes our expertise helps us see things other people miss. Sometimes it causes us to see things that are not there.

A Crash Analysis Studio in Brandon, Manitoba, taught me that lesson.

The Crash in Brandon

On June 27, 2022, shortly after 10 p.m., Grant Hamilton was cycling home with his wife after a family event in Brandon, Manitoba. At the intersection of Lorne Avenue East and Park Street, a westbound driver struck Hamilton as he was cycling east on Lorne Avenue.

Hamilton went over the hood of the vehicle and suffered severe injuries. He tore the meniscus in his knee, separated his shoulder, and lost his left pinky finger. He ultimately received 25 stitches and had his hand reconstructed at a hospital in Winnipeg.

Strong Towns later convened a Crash Analysis Studio to examine what had happened. The purpose of the Studio was not to recreate the collision with perfect certainty or determine who deserved blame. We wanted to ask a different set of questions: What conditions were present? What might have contributed to this crash? What could the community learn from it? What aspects of the built environment were within the community’s power to change?

We brought together technical professionals and people with local knowledge of Brandon. We reviewed the crash information, maps, photographs, and the design of Lorne Avenue and Park Street. Then we talked.

One issue kept coming up. People were not stopping at the intersection, and I thought I understood what they meant.

Of Course Those Are Stop Signs

I look at the streets all the time. I am a trained architect and urban designer, and I have spent decades working in and around local government. I spend far too much time wandering around places looking at curbs, buildings, intersections, and how people move through them.

When preparing for Crash Analysis Studios, I routinely spend time looking through Street View and studying photographs of crash locations. So when I looked at the Brandon intersection I saw the street, the poles, and the signs. I knew what I was looking at: stop signs.

The discussion about motorists not stopping seemed familiar to me. I live in a neighborhood where we joke that stop signs are not for the locals. My neighbors are familiar with the streets and are already driving really slow. However visitors driving through for the first time come to a complete stop. Someone who has driven the same intersection a thousand times might roll through it.

During the Studio, I asked whether these were like the stop signs in my neighborhood. Were they really there for the outsiders, while the locals knew the intersection and tended to roll through them?

One of the local experts stopped me and told me to look more closely.

I had looked closely, or at least I thought I had before the studio. So I opened the street view and the photos for the studio and took a second look.  

But when we zoomed in, there it was. This intersection did not have red octagonal stop signs, it has bright yellow, triangular yield signs.

The official crash information confirmed it. Park Street was controlled by two yield signs, while traffic on Lorne Avenue had the right of way. I had been staring directly at them, and I had not seen them.

I Wasn’t Missing Information

That moment has stuck with me through every Crash Analysis Studio I have worked on since. The problem was not that I did not have enough information. The information was directly in front of me. The problem was that I had already decided what the information meant.

I saw a neighborhood intersection like the ones in my neighborhood. I saw a pole and markings in a familiar location of traffic-control signs. My professional experience completed the picture for me to conclude there were stop signs.

That is the strange thing about expertise. Years of experience allow us to process enormous amounts of information very quickly. A transportation engineer can glance at a street and recognize things most people would never notice. A planner reads development patterns. A police officer sees things in a crash scene differently from a public works employee. A person who uses a wheelchair notices details many designers routinely overlook.

Expertise gives us a lens, but every lens also filters. In Brandon, my technical background did not merely cause me to overlook something. It caused me to substitute what I expected to see for what was actually there.

It took a local expert with a different kind of expertise to interrupt me.

Observe First, Interpret Second

The Crash Analysis Studio is often described as a process for examining serious crashes and identifying contributing factors. It is that, but I increasingly think one of its most valuable functions is simpler: it teaches us how to observe.

A Studio creates a structured conversation where a police officer, engineer, planner, elected official, advocate, resident, and other participants can look at the same place and describe different things. The objective is not to determine who in the room has the best eyes. It is to recognize that none of us sees everything.

Instead of asking one expert to provide the answer, the Studio gives people with different forms of knowledge permission to compare what they see. One person notices the pavement while someone else notices the lighting. Another person knows how children cross the street after school. Someone who cycles the route knows why riders move several feet into the travel lane at one particular location.

Sometimes a person who lives nearby has to tell the professional who studies streets for a living that the thing he thinks he sees is not actually there.

That is not a failure of the process. That is the process working.

Learning to Look Again

The Brandon Studio ultimately recommended changes to the traffic controls, along with a series of other immediate, near-term, and long-term responses to the conditions participants observed.

Those recommendations mattered, but the lesson I continue to carry into conversations with cities happened before any recommendation was made. I was wrong about what I was looking at, not because I was uninformed, but because I was informed. My experience allowed me to recognize a familiar pattern so quickly that I stopped observing it.

That is a bias every professional carries in some form. The response is not to disregard expertise. It is to put expertise into conversation with other ways of knowing a place.

This is why I want cities conducting Crash Analysis Studios to spend more time learning how to observe. Slow down and walk the location. Take photographs. Stand where the pedestrian stands. Look from the driver’s approach. Travel the route of the cyclist. Ask the person who lives there what you are missing. Then bring those observations into a room and compare them.

The Crash Analysis Studio can help a city respond differently after a tragedy. It can identify contributing factors, create a feedback loop, and give professionals a process for taking action instead of simply assigning blame. But perhaps there is something even more fundamental happening: it can teach us to look at familiar places with unfamiliar eyes.

Safer streets begin with understanding the street that is actually there. Sometimes that starts with someone saying, “Look again.”