Michael Moynihan: When a pedestrian is killed, should we blame the traffic engineer?

I eventually found him in his lair at the University of Denver. He started our chat the same way he starts teaching his civil engineering classes.

“At the beginning of a semester I ask my students what transportation is for. A lot of them say, ‘It's about moving people and goods from A to B.’ The conventional answer.

“Then we talk bigger — about transport really being about getting people access to jobs, to school, to social or recreational opportunities. The real goal is to connect people with places and goods and each other.

“If the goal is just moving things from A to B, then you’re always thinking about reducing congestion and increasing speed. But if you're thinking about it more broadly, more about accessibility than mobility, you work with a bigger toolbox.”

My reasons for chatting to Wesley should be fairly clear to regular readers. This column often fixates on particular parts of Cork and their specific challenges. Traffic congestion, the dangers facing pedestrians, cycling issues: there’s no shortage of knotty probems.

Of course, we may not even be framing the basic questions properly.

What is the street for?

“This is probably more personal, but I'd argue that it isn't always best to get through everything as fast as you can. Slowing down means noticing things and places you might not see when travelling 60mph, but which you’d notice going 20mph. There are some benefits when you look at how long it takes people to get places.

“Now, there are also some contexts where the street is really for just moving cars through it, and that's it. But that’s not downtown. There are other purposes for the streets there.

“When you start thinking about what streets are for and who streets are for, then it starts changing your mentality on how they should be designed and even what metrics we're using to design them.

“Often we're simplifying things with a focus on vehicle delay and speed. Is that really the right metric? Because if we agree that the vision and goal for this street is something different to just moving cars through it, then you need to get the right metrics to do that.”

Where does consultation feed into that? I mentioned the lengthy process of deliberations and submissions on Bus Connects in Cork to Wesley, and he had an interesting take on public input, though in the general as opposed to the specifics of the Douglas Road bus gates.

“We need this sort of consultation because historically traffic engineers have done a bad job (in America) in, for instance, shoving highways through neighbourhoods — often disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

“But at the same time I see many situations where sometimes we end up doing what we know is not the safest option just because the loudest voice in the room carries the day.

The example I like to give is if we design a building — we’d never ask the public to say how big the beams need to be. That’s for safety and it doesn't matter what the public says — the science tells us how big the beams need to be

“But for whatever reason in transportation, we don't do that. We know we could design a street safer, but sometimes we're like, ‘well, let's hear what everybody has to say’ and then we backtrack from what could be safer because there's a vocal minority that’s angry about something specific.

“We want to include all the voices but we can't let it overwhelm our safety.”

Talking of safety ... Wesley’s book pinpoints a tendency to assign blame in road traffic accidents to driver error while absolving road designers.

“That (tendency) is useful for the police, or for insurance companies, to figure out who’s at fault or who’ll pay, but it’s not useful at all for the engineers who are trying to do better work.

“We all want a data-driven approach to road safety but what happens is we look at the data and all the data tells us we have a human error problem. How do we solve that? Usually we try a PSA (public service announcement), ‘Drive safer’, or tell the police to enforce the laws better.

“But we never think ‘hey, what could we have done better as engineers?’ and engineering as a possible solution off the table.

“We can still determine who is at fault with a crash but engineers should also be thinking of accidents as something we can potentially fix with engineering.

“Even things like drunk driving crashes ... it may not be the case in Ireland but here we have many bars in the middle of nowhere with a giant parking lot, and the only way to get there is via car. To me that's partially a design problem — we could do a better job of placing the bar so it's more accessible by something other than a car.”

The basic elements of road design can also contribute to danger on those roads.

“In America, we design these roads that are way oversized — they're almost enticing people to go fast. Yet we put up a speed limit sign that says you should go slow.

If we simply blame people for speeding on roads, though, it takes us as designers off the hook even though those roads entice them to speed. We should ask another question: why are they speeding? How can engineering be maybe more self-enforcing on the speed limit instead of just relying on the drivers to do better?

“Take jaywalking. If somebody jaywalking gets killed it's easy to blame them, but when you zoom out you might say, well, the nearest crosswalk (pedestrian crossing) was half a mile away. It seems rational that person crossed where they did when you start thinking about it from that perspective. Then it's no longer an error.

“That's the danger of just treating them all as human errors.”

We chatted on: I pointed out that cars and bikes have very vocal representation here, but the pedestrians seem to be missing a lobby group.

“It’s the same issue here. I joke in the book that it's hard for me to get excited about all the technology like the Hyperloop and autonomous vehicles when we can't even get the sidewalks right. In downtown Denver I don't have to go far before the sidewalk is just missing.

“Over here we have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a lot of cities are getting sued for doing a bad job of providing disabled folks with accessible sidewalks and curb ramps and so on.

“That's been the only impetus for pedestrian reform compared to the bike and the car lobbies, really.”

Not that different from ourselves in a lot of ways.

*Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System by Wes Marshall (Island Press).