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I think building up expertise and understanding at a lower level is brilliant. Brushing your teeth is important (to stretch your comparison). There are implici

by 7952 4y ago

I think building up expertise and understanding at a lower level is brilliant. Brushing your teeth is important (to stretch your comparison). There are implicit assumptions in highway standards that people don't really understand. Engineers balance cost, safety, traffic flow, pedestrian flow etc. It is optimal within a particular set of assumptions about those things. The public should have more power to influence that balance at a local level. I agree that this was misguided, but the impulse is good. Ideally we would have simple apps that could help people plan transport in their communities and understand the risks better. The problem of badly designed roads is too large to be solved by highway engineers alone. And the fact that we have so many terrible roads is not a good indorsement of the status quo.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
> Engineers balance cost, safety, traffic flow And they generally don't wanna talk about it because lord knows a subset of the public throws a fit once you start trying to draw a line in the safety sand.
- 7952 4y ago
  It's understandable though. These are inherently political questions and people are locked out of that process. And there really isn't an objective solution to balancing those factors I have worked in air quality assessment and you see something similar. A single development usually has statistically negligible effect on air quality. No measurable impact on health. But that isn't really the whole story. Vehicle exhaust absolutely does effect health. It is understandable that people object to that on a specific case by case basis even when tacitly consenting at a societal level But mostly I think safety is used as a proxy for other things. Adding a lane to a highway can have a safety justification even when the real purpose is something else. Everyone is lazy, and the degree we allow a sense of entitlement changes over time.
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
Traffic engineers consistently prioritize traffic flow above all else. Civil disobedience is one of the few tools pedestrians have to fight back.

by 7952 4y ago

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

> Engineers balance cost, safety, traffic flow And they generally don't wanna talk about it because lord knows a subset of the public throws a fit once you start trying to draw a line in the safety sand.

7952 4y ago
It's understandable though. These are inherently political questions and people are locked out of that process. And there really isn't an objective solution to balancing those factors I have worked in air quality assessment and you see something similar. A single development usually has statistically negligible effect on air quality. No measurable impact on health. But that isn't really the whole story. Vehicle exhaust absolutely does effect health. It is understandable that people object to that on a specific case by case basis even when tacitly consenting at a societal level But mostly I think safety is used as a proxy for other things. Adding a lane to a highway can have a safety justification even when the real purpose is something else. Everyone is lazy, and the degree we allow a sense of entitlement changes over time.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago

Traffic engineers consistently prioritize traffic flow above all else. Civil disobedience is one of the few tools pedestrians have to fight back.