Rethinking Road Safety: An Engineer's Critique of Traffic Design
Discover why traffic engineer Wesley Marshall argues that road design, not driver error, is to blame for rising pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the US.
David Zipper's article in Bloomberg CityLab explores Wesley Marshall's groundbreaking book, "Killed by a Traffic Engineer," which critiques traditional traffic engineering. Marshall argues that road design, not driver error, is the main culprit behind rising pedestrian and cyclist deaths. He challenges the profession's emphasis on speed over safety and highlights how current practices often ignore real-world data and human behavior.
“We all want to blame crashes on human error. But if the data is telling us that all the problems are from people behaving badly, we should start to ask, well, why are people behaving like this?”
Marshall calls for a shift from optimizing traffic flow to improving access and safety for all road users, suggesting that current engineering practices are driven by outdated ideologies rather than empirical evidence.
