Transportation engineering
Engineers to U.S. DOT: Transportation Is About More Than Moving Cars
A trade group representing the transportation engineering profession thinks it's high time for American policy makers to stop focusing so much on moving single-occupancy vehicles.
August 26, 2016
Translating Road Engineer-Speak Into Honest English
Scott White at Velo Paso in the great state of Texas has been developing these "snarky pseudo infographics" based on some of his observations of the traffic engineering world. He's been Tweeting them under the hashtag #TransPedia, a satirical take on the language of road widening and car-centric street design.
May 20, 2015
Exposing the Deep-Seated Bias in Transportation Decision Making
Transportation engineers think of themselves as detached and data driven. But bias is built in to many of the profession's key metrics, write Eric Dumbaugh, Jeffrey Tumlin, and Wesley Marshall in an excellent report recently published by the Institute for Transportation Engineers Journal [PDF]. You can trace this bias all the way back to the dawn of the automotive era.
October 16, 2014
Beyond “Level of Service” — New Methods for Evaluating Streets
Streetsblog reported earlier this month that transportation agencies are increasingly aware of the insidious consequences of using "Level of Service" as the primary metric for their projects. Because Level of Service only rewards the movement of motor vehicles, it promotes dangerous, high-speed streets and sprawling land use.
October 23, 2013
How Better Traffic Models Can Lead to More Mixed-Use Development
Here's another obscure but significant obstacle to building walkable places in America: the Institute of Transportation Engineers' shoddy traffic generation models for mixed-use development.
June 4, 2013
Attacking the Language Bias in Transportation Engineering
"Improvement." "Upgrade." "Level of Service." The traffic engineering profession is full of buzzwords laden with meaning -- and, for the most part, the embedded meaning is something to the effect of "cars are king."
June 3, 2013