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The deserved marginalization of traffic engineers

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One of the only photos of 19th Century bloodletting known to exist. Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Before the rise of modern medicine, doctors all around the world practiced something called bloodletting. The basic idea was that illnesses were caused by bad blood, which had to be removed. A whole profession rose up around the theory and practice of bloodletting. It dominated medicine for generations.

But there was a problem: People who should have been getting better after bloodletting kept dying. George Washington is the most famous example. On the day he died, enough blood was intentionally removed from his body to fill a 12 pack.

As the 19th Century rolled on, humanity’s grasp of science improved and we eventually learned that removing large amounts of blood weakens patients and doesn’t treat most illnesses. Rather than helping people, bloodletting actually made them worse. Doctors who were trying to help people had actually been murdering them.

In short, the fundamental theory behind bloodletting was completely wrong.

Sound familiar? It’s a lot like 20th Century traffic engineering. At the advice of traffic engineers, America spent the latter half of the 20th Century building larger and larger roads in order to relieve congestion, which only got worse and worse with every subsequent enlargement. We rebuilt our civilization around universal car use, and then discovered that when everyone is forced to drive everywhere for everything it actually reduces our mobility.

Oops.

And so, as the 21st Century chugs along, more and more people are calling into question the ridiculous tools of traffic engineering, and no longer giving the profession carte blanche to design our infrastructure. Traffic engineers, as a result, are finding themselves increasingly marginalized. Those who cannot or will not evolve away from what they learned in the 20th Century are being gradually stripped of their respected authority.

In an interesting oped to the Engineering News-Record, traffic engineer Sam Schwartz discusses this increasing marginalization, and calls upon traffic engineering to progress as a profession. He decries the mentality that cars are “real transportation” and anything else is “alternative transportation,” and cites easy-to-understand mathematical facts supporting multimodalism.

If we are going to function as a technologically advanced civilization then we need transportation engineers. Street design is a difficult and complicated proposition, and requires a professional touch. The good news is that many traffic engineers are beginning to see the light, and move away from the archaic dogma of the 20th Century.

December 13th, 2011 | Permalink
Tags: history, roads/cars, transportation



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