Charles Marohn  0:00  

Hey everybody, this Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. I'm laughing already. I haven't even introduced you yet, but I feel like I have to start this with an apology, because at our National Gathering, I got up and I gave a keynote, and I'm talking to our Strong Towns people. I'm like, "Here's how we inspire change, here's the disposition." And I was going through things, and I said, "Don't go out there and have a war on cars. Don't go out there and say traffic engineers have killed us." And you emailed me. And by the way, I'm talking to Wes Marshall. You emailed me and said, "Oh man, I read this thing," and you were very generous to me. I'm like, I feel bad because I hadn't even read your book yet. I've read it now. It's fantastic. I finally got here so I just want to apologize for maybe out of context referencing you.

Wes Marshall  1:01  

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of engineers are taken aback by the title and refuse to read it, but if they do read it, they'll realize that I'm not blaming them, I'm blaming our discipline for teaching us these things, and making us think these things are steeped in safety when they're not. It's easy to blame these on human error, but when you take a step back and try to understand why people were doing what they're doing, that's where that "Killed by a Traffic Engineer" comes from, because it's the infrastructure we're providing that is leading to it. It's not intentional, like we're not malicious out there trying to do it. But we think we're doing things based in science, we think we're doing best practices, but the empirical outcomes are showing us that it's not leading to good safety. And I did get a few people saying that they asked you at your National Gathering-

Charles Marohn  1:50  

Oh yeah, all the time! It's like, "Why haven't you." This is just proof yet again, that I'm ignorant of many things.

Wes Marshall  2:06  

We all are.

Charles Marohn  2:06  

Anyway, you said we met before, and I apologize for that too. So I am glad that we're finally chatting. I want to start by throwing baby boomers under the bus in a small way. Here's some of the things that I learned from you. You talked today about how the early engineers doing highway building and road building and what have you kind of acknowledged up front that they didn't know what they were doing, and they were trying to figure it out. And in my mind, I had my grandpa, who was a Marine in World War Two. This generation that came back, had been through the Depression, and I could see them going out and going, "Okay, we got to solve this problem. What do we do? I don't know. Let's try this, and then we'll write a manual and explain." And then the next generation, which is why I'm going to throw the boomers under the bus, come along and they're like, "All right, it's codified. Let's go." You've done some amazing research where you went back and looked at that stuff. Can you talk about that? Because that was new to me.

Wes Marshall  3:11  

That was one of the most fascinating things. What I wanted to do was not just point out all the things we're doing wrong as a discipline, but really understand why we're doing what we're doing. I found so many interesting stories, and a lot of it at the time was like the early engineer saying "Oh, we don't really know what we're doing. We're going to try this. Hopefully it works, but we need to study this," so on and so forth. But, you know, 10, 20 years later, we stopped citing the original study, we stopped looking the original study. And we think what they did was already steeped in science. So like the those things became harder to fix the more years went by, because the next generation didn't know that those things were so up in the air. They didn't know that they were still testing things. I think we know as engineers that's how we work. We try things, try to figure out what works, and if it does work, we double down. If it doesn't, we pull back. But this was such a long period of time that the stuff that we should have pulled back on, we never got a chance to. Because it got codified in ways that were hard to fix, and we stopped citing those original research studies, even understanding that it was a question. These things that we think are set in stone, they never were, but they became set in stone because the generations went by and we allowed them to be. And that was really what I wanted to show, that this stuff wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai to Moses on these stone tablets. It was really just people trying to figure stuff out.

Charles Marohn  4:46  

I remember being given this stuff as a young engineer -- 1995 I got out of college. And it was just "Here's how we do it." And so for me, my underlying assumption -- and it took me like a decade to kick this -- was that someone way smarter than me figured this out a long time ago. You talked a little bit about the conservative disposition of engineers. I feel like there's a feedback loop here. When you're handed something like that, I think someone with a conservative bent is going to be like, "Well, someone really smart must have figured this out.  Someone must have paid the price.

Wes Marshall  5:26  

Someone who did their homework must have written this.

Charles Marohn  5:30  

Right! A lot of people died so that I could have this wisdom.

Wes Marshall  5:32  

Yes, I felt the same thing. You were in Minnesota, so you weren't seeing- I was growing up around Boston, so the stuff we were building was never as good as all the stuff I saw around me. So it didn't take me a decade. I was just disillusioned from the get go, and just angry. And I've harnessed that anger into a career somehow.

Charles Marohn  5:51  

I remember the first time I went to New York and I was taking pictures of their streets, because as an engineer, from a small town in Minnesota, I just assumed that, obviously, if our streets are wide and New York has 1000 times the traffic, their streets must be huge. And then I'm there, and I'm like, "What are these tiny streets for?" It was that dissonance that you grew up with.

Wes Marshall  6:14  

Right. When I did a talk in Bentonville, Arkansas, which we're going to for the next CNU, I joke that I literally hit more traffic trying to get from the airport to downtown Bentonville, in that one day, than I hit in Denver in a year. In Denver, I'm usually on my bike, but if I am in my car, I can switch over two blocks. It's a grid, I can get around. I'm never driving on the highways during rush hour. But that one day in Bentonville, which is a much smaller town than than Denver is, I'm like, "Why am I stuck in traffic?? And then you realize that it's because you only can be on this one road. There's only one way to get from A to B, and everyone's trying to take this left turn. So either I take this left turn here, or I go down and turn around. They have so much more traffic, the roads are wider than they are in big cities, and you start trying to figure out why it's like this. And they still have congestion problems. They haven't even fixed the problem they're trying to solve. I think there's so much in this that, if you start thinking too much about it, it starts to drive you crazy. A lot of my students come back to me like "You've ruined my life because I can't walk around a city or drive around a city without getting angry now," because I've taught them all these things to look at.

Charles Marohn  7:23  

Yeah, all the time. Let me say something and have you react to it. I feel like the idea that our predecessors were trying to figure things out is a invitation for engineers today to experiment. In other words, to say "I'm not bound by this." Is that a fair interpretation?

Wes Marshall  7:48  

That is what I would hope would come out of this. I didn't know where it would end up when I started down these rabbit holes, but now that I've done what I've done, that is the hope. We need to be more empirical again. We can't take it for granted that everything was steeped in 100 years of safety science, because now I think I've pointed out that it's not.

Charles Marohn  8:08  

Did you ever get to meet Donald Shoup?

Wes Marshall  8:10  

Yeah, I introduced him when he did his keynote at CNU.

Charles Marohn  8:14  

Oh, did you really?

Wes Marshall  8:15  

Yeah. I came up beforehand, and I did a little parking speech about some of that early parking research I did and then he came on after. Also, I used to run the CNU research sessions, and he submitted a paper that year. So he did another presentation in our small research room. Yeah, he was amazing. When I wanted to present him, I held up my original copy of his book. And when we were sitting backstage, he just grabbed it and signed it. And he says, "Thanks for being a co-conspirator in parking reform. From Shoup Dog."

Charles Marohn  8:50  

Really? He did not.

Wes Marshall  8:52  

He wrote Shoup Dog.

Charles Marohn  8:53  

Oh my gosh.

Wes Marshall  8:54  

That is sitting in my office right now and I treasure that.

Charles Marohn  8:58  

That is beautiful. I got to meet him once, and I was just in awe. His data broke my mind. You talked about that a little bit today.

Wes Marshall  9:10  

That was my first introduction to research. So I took his mindset, not just in the book but everything I've done since then. Let's really understand the science behind this. Is it really what we think it is? And it wasn't for parking generation. It wasn't for parking ordinances. Even that original parking research I was doing in Connecticut, I started trying to figure out where these original ordinances came from. The first city in Connecticut to do their own parking mandates, they just copied a city in Florida. And then the next city in Connecticut copied that one. Like it wasn't based in anything. It was just, "Oh, this other city is doing it this way. Let's do it too."

Charles Marohn  9:47  

He had a page in his book where there was just one data point. And I'm like "What is this?"

Wes Marshall  9:54  

In my class last week, I showed the OP. There was two data points, and they were at the top left and the bottom right of the graph, but the line went from the bottom left to the top right. They drew the line in the opposite direction because they just assumed more parking with more land use with more square footage, but the points were the exact opposite direction. I guess, for them, the good news is they did not put an r squared on that. They just left that blank and said r squared equals like, star, star, star. They didn't even pretend they had a statistical, but they did draw that best fit line that was not the best fit line whatsoever.

Charles Marohn  10:18  

Again, I feel like there's this invitation to dig deeper. You've given me language that not just says this isn't working, but that the people who set this up knew it wasn't perfect. They knew this was the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a conversation.

Wes Marshall  10:52  

Oh, yeah. And I really wanted to hear it in their own words. That's why I was reading hundreds of papers from the 1930s, 40s, 50s. And most engineers I know don't have the time for that nonsense, but I'm a professor, and it was during covid, and I could lock myself in my office for days at a time and not see anybody. So I was able to do this, and I was trying to help our discipline do better. So even though I know for a fact there's some state DOT's that have banned my book from their library-

Charles Marohn  11:20  

Have they really? Oh my gosh.

Wes Marshall  11:22  

Those same ones have had secret book clubs about my books. I've gone on to do Zooms with them. But they refuse to have the book just based on the title. I mean, similar to how you didn't want to talk to me.

Charles Marohn  11:35  

Similar to my reaction, yeah. Apologies again.

Wes Marshall  11:40  

No, no, I'm just giving you a hard time.

Charles Marohn  11:42  

The reality is, you and I both write books, and we have to deal with publishers. And because of that, I might be like, "Here's the title I want to use." And they're Like, "Yeah, you're not gonna do that."

Wes Marshall  12:02  

This was my title. 100% my title. I knew the title 10 years ago because I was trying to talk about how it's systematic. How we engineers can't just blame it on human error anymore. We need to a better job. So I can't blame the publisher at all. We did negotiate the subtitle for like a month. But at the same time, I wasn't writing a book about the history of traffic engineering and safety to make money. I thought I'd go back to my regular job, I wouldn't be at conferences like this doing keynotes. I thought it would be for my friends, for my colleagues, for some of the new urbanist type people. But the fact that people care, and maybe the kind of provocative title has helped the cause, maybe not. I don't know.

Charles Marohn  12:05  

Well, I feel like if a professor can't do it, and a guy running a nonprofit can't do it, like, who can do it? That's always been the thing. You have the credibility to step adjacent to the profession, not necessarily outside, and say, "Let me help you."

Wes Marshall  12:25  

That's why I went back to grad school. Like I said, I was disillusioned early. I had my FE or EIT at the time, so I was working with the PEs, and I'd always ask them why. There were a couple that would give me the time of day, but-

Charles Marohn  12:51  

"Chuck, yours is not to ask why. Yours is just to do or die."

Wes Marshall  13:10  

Right! "This is just the way we do it."

Charles Marohn  13:10  

I don't know how many times that was said to me. Like, "What are you asking so many questions for?"

Wes Marshall  13:33  

Right, and I'm like "Why are you doing it this way? Where's this come from?" I couldn't get satisfactory answers. So once I got my PE, that's when I went back to school, and my company is like, "Wait, you just got your PE. Why would you go get your Masters and PhD now? We don't hire PhD." And I was like, "Well, because I don't want to really work here anymore. I want to do other stuff." But if you're in a consulting firm, you don't have time to go down that rabbit hole of the why question. You're trying to get the next project, you're trying to finish the last project, you have billable hours. And I got to a point where I was kind of sick of billable hours, and a professor job solves that problem for me, unless we do stuff that drives me crazy.

Charles Marohn  14:17  

Let me even take that a step further. I've watched Toole do amazing things, and I'm assuming they're making money because they're growing and they're in high demand, but there's really not an easy business model to make a lot of money doing nuanced, bottom-up, block-level engineering. Solving the problem of a kid who had a mild diversion to get across the street is going to result in an engineering project that's probably less than $50,000, but the fees to do it would probably be $50,000. So that's not a viable project from a consulting firm standpoint.

Wes Marshall  15:06  

Some of the consultants I talked to around Denver -- I had coffee with one not too long ago -- they're doing these big highway projects still to pay the bills. And because they're doing those, that lets them do the kind of work that this person I was meeting with likes doing. But it was hard. They weren't at the level Toole was, so it was hard for them to do just this good stuff that they're all wanting to do. Like you have to do some of the stuff that's not what we're all hoping our cities shift into. But to be honest, that's what pays the bills for these firms.

Charles Marohn  15:38  

This is the best advertisement to go to CNU. Okay, let me ask you. I feel like the hatred for the 85th percentile speed is misplaced. I feel like the great insight on 85th percentile speed is that people will drive the speed they feel comfortable driving. And I feel like what happens then is the desire amongst particularly advocates to say, "Well, we don't want people driving that fast, so the 85th percentile speed is broken." And I feel like the core insight is really good, but I would take the other side, which is, "We've made it too comfortable to drive fast." The proper response is not to raise the speed limit. It's actually to go in and make it less comfortable to drive at that speed.

Wes Marshall  16:24  

I 100% agree.

Charles Marohn  16:27  

Okay. I feel like I'm always trying to defend the 85th percentile speed.

Wes Marshall  16:38  

We're using it wrong.

Charles Marohn  16:40  

We're using it wrong, totally agree.

Wes Marshall  16:41  

Yeah, we should be using it to test the street. If we write our target speed is, let's say, 30. And we put it out there, we run some speed studies, and we're getting 45, that means we failed. We did it wrong. So then we need to go back to the drawing board and say, "Well, what can we do to get the target speed?" We shouldn't be using it to set the speed limit, we should be using it as a precursor to redesigning the street to get what we want to get.

Charles Marohn  17:06  

How do you think about speed limits? Because this is another related tension that I often confront with the advocacy community, who I love and embrace, like I think their hearts are in the right place. We want to make this safer. But "You know what we need to do here? The speed limit's 40, it should be 30. Or the speed limit's 30, it should be 20. Lower it, and now we're good." I really feel like that is misplaced energy. How do you process that?

Wes Marshall  17:43  

So, with cities that have lowered their speed limit just arbitrarily. The research I've seen is finding that, if they drop it by five miles per hour, they don't get a drop of five miles an hour. They get like 2.4. So you get a sort of half bang for your buck, let's say, which is not nothing. But I would ideally want us all to start designing our streets so they're self enforcing. It's expensive. It's hard to do. I know we can't do that everywhere and anywhere, so you have to balance it. There are things we can do to do it more cheaply, like maybe some tactical urbanism to get the lower speeds. But that's where we need to end up generations from now, where all the streets are self enforcing and that we have to worry about this stuff. But we're not anywhere near that point. So changing the speed limit sort of arbitrarily, it's not terrible but it's not good either. Like, I don't disagree with you, but I think it's still worth its step.

Charles Marohn  18:45  

I always feel like I never would want to go fight anyone who's doing it, but I also am not, like, "Hey, everyone listening to Strong Towns go do this."

Wes Marshall  18:54  

Yeah, that shouldn't be the goal.

Charles Marohn  18:56  

Right. So, how do speed cameras fit into your world? I have, like, horrible nuance on speed cameras.

Wes Marshall  19:06  

I mean, I think they don't work well when it's just like one off here and there. So Denver, we have, I think a half dozen. Let me tell you an example from Australia. So I was there for sabbatical for six months. I remember getting in an Uber, and the guy was driving way more safely than any Uber driver I've ever seen in my life. So I was like, "Hey, what's going on?" He's like, "Well, there's cameras everywhere. If I get a ticket, it's like $500 and it's points in my license. I lose money for the week." So they have cameras just everywhere, so nobody is speeding. It was like four months before we rented a car, but we were gonna go up and down the coast, and I remember on the highway I was going like, 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, and I was passing everybody. I was like, "What's wrong?" In America, I'd be getting passed. But then you realize they take your picture at Point A. 20 miles later, they take your picture again. And if you average more than two kilometers per hour over the speed limit, they'll send you a ticket. So they've created this culture. There's an awareness and it's also everywhere. It's not like speed trap style.

Wes Marshall  19:06  

Don't they also adjust your ticket based on your ability to pay, that kind of thing?

Wes Marshall  20:16  

I don't think Australia does that. That's more Sweden and Finland, where those NHL players are getting $100,000 tickets for speeding, and they're going like 20 miles an hour of the speed limit. But in Australia, they're definitely way more expensive than here. In Denver, if you get a camera speeding ticket, it's like 75 bucks, no points on your license. Down there is like $500 and points on your license, like it's a real ticket. And at the same time, that's better than having police stop somebody, which we know takes like 26 minutes and can lead to all these other horrific things. So in the grand scheme of things, I think the cameras is a good thing.

Charles Marohn  20:57  

To me, what you're saying is that, unless it's a ubiquitous culture shift, it's not really a thing.

Wes Marshall  21:03  

Yes, like, that's what you sort of need, and we're not at that point. Everyone treats them as a cash grab by the city or big brother's watching us, so it becomes a big political issue. Whenever I see those arguments about cameras, nobody's even talking about safety. They're talking about tertiary stuff. If we can keep the conversation on safety and use the cameras in a way that actually helps safety, and start doing research to show this, that would be a better solution. But at the same time, if we have self-enforcing streets, we don't even need the camera. So, there's bigger picture things we could be doing, and the cameras have been proven to help but we're not really using them right.

Charles Marohn  21:44  

Yeah. You made a brilliant statement today. You said "The most dangerous streets are the most intensely engineered." And I feel like I've said that in like 200 words, but I've never said it as profoundly as you did. That is, to me, a deep insight that should make every engineer cry. Can you elaborate on that? I feel like there's a conversation about engineering judgment that I would like you to talk about, because engineers talk about liability and "I gotta follow the Greenbook" and da, da, da, da. Why should this make us cry? And how do we think differently about this?

Charles Marohn  21:44  

A lot of cities are looking at high injury networks, especially the ones that have declared Vision Zero, where like 50% of your fatalities and severe injuries on 5% of streets, or 60% on 6%, whatever it is. When you start taking a good look at the streets that are part of that, they're usually the state DOT roads, the ones that they've designed, the ones that they've put all of our know-how, all of our Greenbook, all of that.

Charles Marohn  21:44  

The best and the brightest are working on this one.

Wes Marshall  21:50  

Right, and those are the ones killing people, right? Part of it is that we weren't actually focused on safety. it's on capacity, it's on speed. Those are our real priorities. But when you start actually thinking about it from the safety standpoint, it's like, what have we done wrong? Why are the oldest cities with the oldest streets that would not pass muster today our safest cities and our safest streets? That's the big disconnect I saw growing up near Boston. That street is way safer, but we can't build it today. But this street is the one we're replicating all over the country, and it's way less safe. When you start thinking about it in those terms, it seems so obvious, but for some reason, we're still doing it.

Charles Marohn  23:38  

How should engineers think about liability? It's the lazy thing that gets thrown back at us when we say to do things differently. It's ubiquitous. They all talk about it.

Wes Marshall  23:50  

Oh yeah. I mean, I've heard the same thing for a lot of years. It's tough to give a succinct answer to this, because on one level, you would want to say is like, "Well, just because what we're building is in these quote, unquote standards, doesn't mean it's safe. If we know this, that should be a liability issue in itself. And there's one example I give in the book of a kid in New York, Anthony Turturro, that got hit. He's still alive, but he had severe injuries. There was a speeding driver that hit him, the family sued the city and the driver, and the city was held responsible because they followed the standards. They followed the standards to a tee, but they knew it was still an unsafe street with speeding problems, and they didn't do anything about it. So if we can shift the liability more in that direction, it gives us a need to use engineering judgment. It's tricky, but it has to sort of shift. As is, the way we classify all our crash data to blame the road users lets us off the hook. That's where it becomes "The liability is not on our hands." Like, "The blood's not on our hands because we built a safe system. As long as they follow the rules, they'd be safe too, and they didn't, so it's on them." I hear that from engineers all the time. Like, "What the hell we supposed to do if someone drives the wrong way down a highway?"

Charles Marohn  25:12  

"Someone was speeding."

Wes Marshall  25:14  

Right. But there are things we can do. Like, I now know some of our off-ramps to highways, we don't have the green ball. We have a green straight arrow to make sure the drivers know. There are little things we can do that might help the cause a little bit. If we treat all our severe and fatal crashes in that way, you can get different answers than just saying, "Hey, it's out of our hands. Human error."

Charles Marohn  25:39  

You said this let us off the hook. The state of Oklahoma has all their crash data plotted up on a map. Someone sent to me once, "Here's all our fatal crashes." And it had a little legend on the side, and you could click on and off the cause of the crash. Was the cause of the crash speeding? Was it impaired driving? Was it texting? And they had, like, choose your five boxes. And bad engineering was not one of them. I feel like there's this self-reinforcing echo chamber of, like, "Here's what we measure. I'm gonna go and look at this crash. Forget the fact that the lanes are 14 feet wide and there's a massive clear zone, and the speed limit set at 30 but the median speed is 55. I'm just looking at whether this driver was speeding." Who's going to break this cycle? How do we break it? Because that feels almost like, what I call the internet connection problem. You call your ISP, and they're like, "Oh no, it's your internet provider." And then your internet provider says, "Oh no, it's the cable company." And then they say, "Oh no, it's your next door neighbor." Like no one's to blame. How do we actually break out of that? Because it feels like we just collect the data to reinforce our bias.

Wes Marshall  26:56  

Right. And if you look at the data wholesale like that on a dashboard, it's easy to fall into those traps. We all do it. You're clicking those boxes like "Oh, yeah." But if you start looking more carefully, like you guys are doing the Crash Analysis Studios. I was watching the one you did on Quebec Street in Denver near me, because that's less than mile from where I live. You're digging into the crash in a much deeper, more thoughtful way, trying to understand that, yes, this guy was drinking, but we also placed the bar in the middle of nowhere with only a parking lot and no Uber, no Lyft, no transit, no walking, no biking. Like, what do we kind of expect to happen in that situation? That's not an engineering problem. That's more of a land-use type thing. "Killed by a Planner" might be a chapter in my next book.

Charles Marohn  27:43  

It maybe should be.

Wes Marshall  27:44  

At the same time, it's going to be the case with almost every crash, if you start trying to understand why these things happen and not just blame them. Like when you go out there and you see everybody is speeding, it's not really an error. Everyone's doing it. When someone's doing the very normal thing that we all do every time we're in the transportation system, we shouldn't be classifying that as an error. That's normal behavior. We need to start rethinking those things, and asking why these things are happening in a deeper way. And you know, I talked in the podcast we just taped five minutes ago about Denver's rapid response team. When there is a fatal crash, they have a team that goes out and digs into those specifics. More cities need to be willing to do that and not just stick their head in the sand and say,"If we do change something, we kind of seem liable." We should be proactive about trying to fix those problems. But it's easier to say "They should have been speeding. They shouldn't have been jaywalking. They shouldn't have been drinking." Whatever it was, it's an easier way for us to proceed. It makes us all feel like we're doing our job well. But we see the outcomes, and we're nowhere near vision zero, so we can do better.

Charles Marohn  28:58  

I was going to ask you about Vision Zero. I feel like the Venn diagram with the Strong Towns movement and Vision Zero people has a lot of overlap. Where we like them, they like us, we're all friends. You said, and I'm gonna say it because I'll own it too, Vision Zero in North America has been just an abject failure. I don't say how you can say otherwise.

Wes Marshall  29:26  

I think I'd give you a bit more nuance to that. I would say that it has been a failure because we haven't done it for real. We're still doing what we've always done. We're calling it Vision Zero. If we really did Vision Zero, if we really treated any fatal crash as a moral failure, we could, tonight, disallow cars from going over 20 miles in our own cities. We can make that happen, but we're not willing to. It's going to happen with safe systems too, because we're not really doing what we should be doing. So it's hard to even tell if Vision Zero is a failure because we haven't tried it. I talk about this when I do presentations with New Urbanism too. A lot of people will look at new urbanist projects as a failure, because they're not getting the reduction in driving that we want. They're not getting a lot of the things new urbanists have espoused as good outcomes. But when you look more carefully, it's because it just looks the part of new urbanism. It has the front porches, but the transportation and land use stuff is missing. So that's why they're not getting it, because it really isn't new urbanism. And same for Vision Zero. We're not really doing Vision Zero, so it's a failure because we haven't really tried it.

Charles Marohn  30:40  

Do you know Minnesota's Vision Zero plan? It's called Toward Zero Deaths. So aspirational.

Wes Marshall  30:47  

USDOT did the same thing.

Charles Marohn  30:51  

Yeah. It's my favorite because Minnesotans have trouble lying to ourselves, so we don't really have Vision Zero.

Wes Marshall  30:59  

It's a more pragmatic way to think of it.

Charles Marohn  31:01  

Exactly. "We can't do zero. So we'll go toward zero."

Wes Marshall  31:05  

You probably know that the USDOT requires every state DOT to give a target for the number of pedestrian and bike deaths in the following years. So after they did that Toward Zero Deaths initiative, they asked those questions to state DOTs. There's 13 states that their goal for the following year was more deaths than the year before.

Charles Marohn  31:29  

No! Oh my gosh.

Wes Marshall  31:30  

More deaths! That's their goal. We're not even going toward zero.

Charles Marohn  31:34  

"Not as many deaths as we would have had."

Wes Marshall  31:36  

They're setting a terribly low bar so they can just go right over it.

Charles Marohn  31:49  

Engineers are good people. I'm friends with so many. They're kind. I tell this story sometimes where, when I was a young traffic engineer, my boss, the head of the department, was over against the wall, crying with this other engineer rubbing his back, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, did his kid die or his wife get cancer? Like, what's going on?" And it was just some elderly woman did a left across traffic and got sideswiped, and it was an intersection that they know was bad because other people had died there. And this like 50-some year old man is over in the corner crying. They care. They absolutely care. But I feel like when you give them a Vision Zero mandate, often today it's like "Oh, okay, so you're telling me we need to make this street wider, have a bigger clear zone, or have a longer turn signal." The lack of curiosity of the other tools. Let me give you this analogy. I feel like I'm talking too much. Remember in the Apollo 13 movie where they're like, "Okay, you have to fit this round thing into this and here's all the parts you have." I actually feel like that was so inspiring as an engineer, because it wasn't like, "Okay, you have unlimited budget and unlimited capacity. How would you do this?" And I almost feel like if we said to our engineers, in a heroic way, "You have to solve this problem with these budget constraints and these tools. Go do it," that American engineers could actually do that. Why don't we ask them to do that? Why isn't that what Vision Zero is like?

Wes Marshall  33:38  

You know those ASCE grades they have for bridges and roads, but they're using in a way, like, "Oh, if you give us all this money, we'll fix all these problems." Right now, if you give transportation engineers and traffic engineers all the money in the world, we might not make the problems any better. We need to get to a new point where we're doing exactly what you're saying, trying to actually solve the real problems. And that's what I loved about some of your slides, where you showed the desire paths. Those are the problems we know we have. We can solve those. The theories that we think lead to safety that don't, I'd be worried that we put all money into stuff like that, like clear zones in cities. We know that doesn't lead to safety, but we still think it does. It's still written down in many of our manuals. I still talk to engineers that think that's their goal when they're trying to redesign urban streets. So we're not at the point where I'm willing to give us all the money to do it, but maybe we need to reframe the problem, like you're saying. I think that would help the cause a lot.

Charles Marohn  34:41  

Bollards. Are they like the greatest invention ever?

Wes Marshall  34:46  

Oh, not the flex post  ones.

Wes Marshall  34:47  

Not the flex post ones! Yeah.

Wes Marshall  34:52  

Have you watched that Twitter, the World Ballard Association. Great photos.

Charles Marohn  34:57  

It's very funny. Why do traffic engineers have an aversion to real bollards?

Wes Marshall  35:08  

I think they think they're dangerous for cars. They feel like the city is going to have to pay money to these drivers that keep bumping into them. But the point of them isn't that, it's to save the pedestrians and the bicyclists lives. We know they would do that, but yeah, you'd have more fender benders. To me, that's a great trade off. More fender benders, fewer people dying. That should be good. But the way we've historically defined safety, fender benders is just the tip of the iceberg, and we just assume that all the other ones follow suit. It's not true, but that's the way we've done things. So I think that's what they're worried about.

Charles Marohn  35:45  

You had that picture in your presentation of all the bollards around. How many times have you seen where the DOTs electrical box is like, rung with bollards?

Wes Marshall  35:55  

You guys had a great blog post about that at one point. Yeah, they won't put the bollard here, but there already is a bollard there because of that electrical transformer.

Charles Marohn  36:05  

But the person pushing the stroller can be right there and they don't get a bollard.

Wes Marshall  36:10  

I don't know. I mean, that's a thing that we could easily be doing. It's such low cost. It would definitely save lives, but again, you'd have more fender benders.

Charles Marohn  36:21  

I feel like there's a mental gap there in the profession. Like, make the best case that engineers aren't.

Wes Marshall  36:28  

People would learn quickly, wouldn't they? Once you hit one of those bollards, like, "Oh, I need to be more careful on this street."

Charles Marohn  36:33  

There's times when I look and say, "Engineers are deeply empathetic and they actually care. They just have a bad tool set." And then when we start talking about bollards, I'm like, "Wait a sec, these guys are sociopaths."

Wes Marshall  36:45  

See, I didn't even go that far.

Charles Marohn  36:51  

But it's like, "I'm worried about the car getting dented, but I've literally designed a breakaway pole where you're going to be standing pressing the button to cross the street." Like, what? How is that coherent?

Wes Marshall  37:05  

We use the word protected and protected bike lane, but rarely are they actually protected. If we want to actually do that, we need to start using real bollards, real concrete, whatever it is, but we're not willing to do it in most places. Like, we think it's a safety hazard either way. So we're leaning against the bollard. I'm sure there's some cities saying it's a snow thing, right? That probably happens in your neck of the woods. It's happening in Denver. When they first started doing even the flex post, they had a hard time getting over that. "Oh, how can we possibly plow this?" It's like, "Well, if you borrow that plow that the parks department has, you can plow pretty easily." And once they did that, it was easy. Now the next step is, let's actually put some real protection.

Charles Marohn  37:50  

Right. Something that you did that was genius, is taking the deaths per vehicle miles traveled and breaking that down. Make the case for deaths per population. It's a little bit harder to do because you had the numbers and it was genius. What's wrong with the death per mile traveled metric?

Wes Marshall  38:10  

To be honest, one of my inspirations for trying to rethink our metrics was the way you and Joe do the property tax per acre. Like your first book, that "Thoughts on" one?

Charles Marohn  38:26  

Oh, the really old self-published one?

Wes Marshall  38:28  

Yes, the really old self published one. There's a chapter of the Walmart versus the mom and pop shop.

Charles Marohn  38:33  

That's all Joe. Yeah, that's Joe's stuff.

Wes Marshall  38:35  

But you read that, it's like, oh my god, we're just measuring the wrong thing. It's so simple when you see it put in those terms, and that's the same thing with safety. There's two ways to get better safety: we reduce fatalities or we can just drive more, and we all seem safer. And to me, it's like, wait, what? How is this the way we're measuring safety? I mean, I can take a step back and explain a little bit better. We measure our road fatality rate in this country in terms of fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. So the numerator is the fatalities, the denominator is the VMT. So ideally, we want to reduce fatalities and get a road fatality rate. But for the past 100 years, we've increased VMT like 30 fold. Our populations only increased two and a half times over that time span but we drive a lot more. So it makes it seem like we're getting safer and safer and safer. And if you measure it per population, yes, we're getting safer, but not nearly as much as we think we are. I try to draw on inspiration from other disciplines when I'm doing a lot of stuff and you read anything about health, nobody measures anything per VMT, they're all measuring it per population. When you think about road safety, it's a health problem. Dying on the roads is not good for your health, so we should be measuring in the same way. When you start doing that way, you get different answers, and you're gonna start building different places. So I try to just run through the numbers. I don't love doing a lot of numbers in the presentation, but I think they're useful.

Charles Marohn  40:07  

They're so effective. And maybe I'm just a math person, so I got it quicker than other people, but oh my gosh, this is brilliant.

Wes Marshall  40:12  

I try to go back to the fundamentals. Let's ask the right question, and then use the right metrics. What gets measured gets managed. I've done a lot of work on counting bikes and stuff, and nobody is doing it. Nobody's counting pedestrians. Nobody is looking to even understand where their sidewalks are. It's a rare thing. And when I look at the success Hoboken's done, yes, they get a lot of their attention for daylighting. But if you go back in time before they started doing this stuff, they measured all their sidewalks. They looked to see exactly where they were and where they weren't, and they started putting money into fixing that problem first. The daylighting came later, but it set the stage for it. So if you ask the right questions, if you use the right metrics, like fatalities per population or per 100,000 population, it's a much fairer comparison, and you can actually start to see real safety differences that we just miss otherwise.

Charles Marohn  41:05  

I think it was All State. It was one of the big insurance companies. They published this report about the most dangerous place to drive in America, and it was Massachusetts. The most dangerous state in America. And I thought "That is total BS." And I looked, and it was actually where they have the most claims, but they're all fender bender. And if you live in Wyoming, that's actually the most dangerous state drive in, because the crashes there are fatalities because everyone's going so darn fast.

Wes Marshall  41:36  

Right. If you look at the fatalities per population, I was comparing, I think Mississippi to one of the European countries that had the same population, and Mississippi's was 35 deaths per 100,000 population, and whatever European country was like three. And you see, if you go back in time, you start seeing Mississippi getting worse and worse and worse. But if you measure it per driving, it doesn't seem like they're getting worse, because they're just driving more.

Charles Marohn  42:03  

We're increasing the amount we drive. So someone posted, and it was one of those memes where I'm like, "That's not quite right, but I get where you're at." Like, "We don't do deaths per cigarette smoked." Because if engineers did death per cigarette smoke, the result would be "Just smoke three packs a day instead of two," and the deaths per cigarette smoked would go way, way down.

Wes Marshall  42:22  

Right? If everyone smokes more, we're all safer.

Charles Marohn  42:25  

There's an absurdity to it, but yet, like there is that kind of is the absurd math we use.

Wes Marshall  42:32  

That was one of the few rabbit holes that I got down where there was kind of an evil person at the bottom trying to make us think. Most of the other ones were very innocuous, it was engineers trying to do good things. This was the CEO of Studebaker literally trying to sell more cars.

Charles Marohn  42:47  

Let's end with this. I did not know you're the father of at least one daughter. How many kids do you have

Wes Marshall  42:54  

Three kids. Two girls and a boy.

Charles Marohn  42:56  

Okay. I'm the father of daughters. I've got two daughters, and my youngest just started college. Being a father of a daughter is like a beautiful thing. You shared with the group this story of a project that your daughter did, and I thought only an engineer's kid would do this. It's so delightful because I can see how the kid, like, was inspired by her dad but then owned the project. Like, I just picturing this kid, like, "Hey, what if I did this," but the results were so beautiful in the context of your daughter, too. So can you tell that story?

Wes Marshall  43:34  

Well actually, the year before that one, Rowan did a project. I have a lot of radar guns I use for work. So they're out there on the street looking at the color of the cars and the gender of the driver. And that first study, she found that women were driving much faster than men on the roads in our neighborhood. So the second one is like, "Alright, let's do something similar." Again, she didn't win the science fair. Again, it goes to some volcano.

Charles Marohn  44:00  

That was a crime. She obviously should have won.

Wes Marshall  44:03  

So the second one, she drew a spectrum of happy to sad faces, and they're beautiful. I've actually used them in real surveys for work since then. So there's the happiest face. Then it gets to the neutral in the middle. At the end is the sad face. So she started by just asking kids at her elementary school, "How do you feel today?" And they would check one of the boxes, and she'd flip over the paper and be like, "How'd you get to school? Did you get driven bus, walk or bike?" And the kids would check one of the boxes. When she went through the data, it was literally statistically significant that the kids that walked and biked were happier. Again, that didn't win the science fair project. And the funny thing is, I went to TRB the next year, and I saw Dan Chapman from Berkeley, doing amazing research on the same grant.

Charles Marohn  44:43  

We could probably get a million dollar grant.

Wes Marshall  44:46  

Yes if you were doing on commuting. It's the same thing. And I go home and I tell my daughter, "There's real researchers doing the same thing you already did!" Doing it at a much bigger scale, but even at that local elementary school level, we need to account for that. If kids are happier doing that, why shouldn't we build places that make that easier?

Charles Marohn  45:07  

Wes Marshall, it's so nice to chat in person. I don't feel like we had to mend fences, but me humble myself to be like, yes. This is so good, and I'm so glad we chatted, and let's stay in touch. I'd love to have you back on the podcast. And you got your own podcast. I did not realize.

Wes Marshall  45:26  

Yeah, it's only been about a month and a half. But David Zipper, you might know him.

Charles Marohn  45:30  

Everybody can do podcasting now.

Wes Marshall  45:34  

It was a technological leap to do it, but it's been fun. But David Zipper does a lot of great journalism. We met a conference and kind of been in touch since then, and we had a few drinks that night. So I suggest that we were the only ones without a podcast.

Charles Marohn  45:49  

That's how it starts. That's how it starts.

Wes Marshall  45:52  

And then a couple months later, we were back like, yeah, we should actually do that. So it's called Look Both Ways with David & Wes. We usually do it live on YouTube, and then take the audio and put it on podcast later. But people seem to like it so far. We're having fun, so we're gonna keep it up. We have an episode next Thursday, on September 11, actually.

Charles Marohn  46:10  

Okay, well that is the most important part, is that it's fun, even more than people listen. If you're having fun doing it, then keep going. Well, we'll send people your way. And, gosh, so nice to see you, and thanks for being on the podcast.

Wes Marshall  46:24  

All right, thanks for having me.

Charles Marohn  46:26  

Everybody, keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  46:31  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.