Conversation with an Engineer
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- Опубліковано 27 сер 2024
- A resident has a conversation with a project engineer about the proposed improvements to her street. We've heard of, seen or taken part in thousands of conversations just like this all across the country. There is no specific inspiration for this dialog beyond an insight that the status-quo justification for many of our community-building projects is based on a flimsy scaffold of unsupportable "truths" and dogmatic beliefs.
We need to challenge the status quo. We need to start building Strong Towns. Learn more at: www.strongtowns...
![Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/7Nw6qyyrTeI/mqdefault.jpg)
![Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]](/img/tr.png)
As a traffic engineer myself, it's sad yet hilarious how much of this rings oh so true... just remember that we're not *all* evil!
I never assume evil intent when the results can be explained by stupidity. It is far more common.
@@macrumpton It's not quite stupidity and not quite malice. I'd say it comes down to a detachment between the actions and the consequences.
A bad standard was created and then implemented over and over again. This is one of the great weaknesses of standardization and beaurocracy. One of the great strengths is that the same system can be used to propogate better and more flexible standards. It's just a matter of getting them changed. But that requires lots of public engagement at the municipal and state level and we're all too busy watching the Federal grudge match on cable tv.
Were not claiming your evil but you must educate yourself to amend/ ignore bad standards
Remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I just started reading Charles Marohn's new book "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer." This dialog is in the Introduction. I urge all engineers whether recovering or not,, and all of their enablers to read it.
The woman is 100% right.
The town I grew up in did the same crap, widening roads, adding traffic lights, putting in more and more stupid shops (3 cigarette stores, 11 gas stations, 8 or 9 conveniences stores,Wal-Mart, Lowes, Home-Depot, 12 restaurants, Kohls, and the list goes on, and all on 3 miles of street)
It ruined the town for anyone living there, as the 5 minute drive to the grocery store now takes 30-45 minutes on a good day. This is a real issue, not a joke.
It takes 30-45 minutes now? Better widen the roads more. And add more parking lots.
I used to live in a "small" xerb of a larger connected city, it is exactly the way you describe your particular city. This city has two restaurants that aren't large chains, 4 big box stores with gargantuan parking lots, and absolutely no character. I was beyond thrilled to move out of that city the moment I had the opportunity.
@@AmbientMorality It has been proven time and time again that widening roads does not help traffic flow.
@@AmbientMorality Rather than parking lots, how about we build more environmentally conscious and build parking garages instead?
I live in a city town and near the old downtown area. There is a three-story parking garage and it works very wonderfully. The community pays for it in taxes and I use it whenever I like. It's great! Now we just need a regional commuter train.
@@HTV-2_Hypersonic_Glide_Vehicle That was sarcasm.
Parking garages, while they can help open up valuable downtown land by condensing car storage, dont help with the underlying issue. If we truely want to build strong cities, we need to reduce parking in their downtown areas, and convert stroads to mix use streets while prioritizing transit with dedicated lanes and signal prioritization, as well as build out and prioritize pedestrian infrastructure. Replacing lots with garages only enforces a sort of status quo.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
Capitalism and the State make quite an unholy alliance. And this is just a tame/suburban version of it...
I was just in a small town in upstate New York that had an "improvement" like this. They made it nearly impossible to cross the street and now the cars go through there like an LA freeway.
Then they’ll put in traffic lights and it’ll be slow and dangerous
LA Freeway = not moving
you see? safer for people in the car
@@tehamill1 it's already dangerous, they're just going to try a new method of fucking it up
@@Saucy-ws6jc No, more like a free flowing LA freeway where everyone goes 80 mph.
@bluebear214 and @thisisbossi ..... thank you guys. Yeah, I know a lot of engineers like you that are trying to change, but some of this "logic" is so deeply embedded in our profession that it is destructive. This video resonates with people because we've all heard parts of this exchange so many times - not just from engineers but also planners, financial advisors, city administrators and elected officials. As our economy tries to transform, it is important that we transform along with it.
OMG financial advisors...yes! MBA speak doesn't make you smarter than me, it just makes me suspicious. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it yourself! I think Einstein said that.
Regarding the engineers, I have to put a lot of blame on planners as well. THey really hem the engineers in.
Wow, I'm literally in tears here. How do we stop this madness?
Can’t. Americans love failure.
TBH, the decision to make this in Xtranormal was brilliant. People who don't know about these issues will never look them up, but will happily watch this video and actually internalize the information.
I work very closely with civil engineers and I hear this conversation on a daily basis. It hurts that I can't do anything about it!
As someone who works in the transportation sector this had me laughing out loud. It sounds exactly like the conversations I have often with Transportation Engineers.
As a project engineer dealing with a traffic engineer in this city, omg, is this video so true. They will insist on a less safe solution because it meets the standard regardless of any common sense. No amount of intelligent arguments can change their minds. Must be nice to be an incompetent robot with no fear of losing one's job or the cost of their bad decisions. Guess this describes much of government in general.
*"No amount of intelligent arguments can change their minds"* well, that tells me that we need to replace those people that make those decisions, shouldn't we??
I suspect part of the problem is that car-centric standards are too rigidly applied, and it's often a matter of complying with state DOT or FHWA/AASHTO regulations. This can imply professional malpractice from the perspective of deviating away from the car-centric standards.
Additionally, you also have the problem of state and federal roads (ex. NHS and Interstate routes) routed through local neighborhoods, and this results in a conflict of power when communities and the city/county want something suitable for the local context, but the state/federal bureaucrats supersede them by claiming this is detrimental to state/interstate transportation needs.
What a blast from the past, i remember this style of video, y'all really have been at this for a while
This video was so much ahead of its time.. its like ChatGPT talking to Bard Ai 🤣🤣🤣
Ok, I'm laughing, but only because this is such a perfect representation of conversations I've had with traffic engineers over the years. When WILL the public smell the coffee??
10 years later… seems like the car brained public will never wake up
@@carstarsarstenstesenn They need an orange pill.
At first it sounded like she was complaining about him making the road safer, I also misheard that it was a public transit development but then as you listen you hear she is totally right. And I also realized it was about car lanes cause I misheard at the beginning. Really important and frustrating. I've seen the aftermath of this, I know a section of houses that are basically stranded between two large streets, the one in front of them being a massive constantly busy main street. I wondered why anyone would buy a house there or live an inch away from the main street by their front door. I didn't realize they expand streets and force people to get rid of their front yard space. There are so many ways of allowing for more people traffic without it being car-centric.
Safe for people's expensive cars, but less so for pedestrians...and homeowners apparently.
This video is a classic. I remember watching it years ago and sharing it with the a bunch of the transportation and highway engineers at work. As a kid, it's fun to build roads for toy cars, but we should never forget that real life is organic and needs thoughtful, nurturing growth much more than an "efficient" design. It's all about the people,not the cars. Anonymity can be dangerous.
As an engineer, I hate working with guys like this. All buzzwords and BS never actually making a point unless you force it out of him.
"Allow traffic to move more smoothly" = Motorists will feel like they can drive faster and dedicate less attention to driving. I have also worked with engineers that sound just like the dog.
This video has aged like fine wine 😂
This video comes up in my feed every now and then. Every year or two.
I can't belive it's 12 years old. This format is so funny now.
Holy crap I'm old.
Yay! Thanks for posting this. So few of us in the USA understand the insidious systemic mechanisms made of a web of laws and economic markets that are destroying communities that already exist and condemning new ones to languish as dysfunctional sprawl. How can you make cars happy if they don't have feelings anyway? And how can you have a community without an identifiable center?
Look at Georgetown or Alexandria VA, these are traditional neighborhoods that thrive and people will pay top dollar to live in... People need to think of pedestrians and people first.... not cars... you don't build an environment for cars..... you build it for people... and cars shouldn't be banned or anything but they should be secondary..... not primary.......
@NaomiWillett We should all care if the cars drive fast. Speed is the primary factor in determining if a pedestrian will die in a crash. At 20 MPH most pedestrians will survive. At 40 MPH most pedestrians will die. But the 40 MPH road will meet the standards.
also building a road that look 40mph then putting a sign that says 25 just makes some people go 40 and some 25 making it less safe than no sign
city of Issaquah: shuts down existing downtown train station and turns it into a museum.
also the city of Issaquah: puts the "transit center of Issaquah" on the opposite end of town with a 14 million dollar parking garage, with only one reliable route that only goes into Seattle.
Brilliant
@RVFR2 Here in Louisville some planners are trying to make a road narrower and reduce traffic speed so the street will become more neighborhood-like and allow people to walk and bike more safely to local businesses. So not all traffic engineers are like this one. Thing is that I went to a community meeting and discovered that there's a huge faction of people who wanted the road to stay the same way so they can drive out of the 'hood as fast as they're used to!
Resistance is futile. Traffic engineers are the Borg.
Engineer (translation): We are going to widen and straighten the street turning it into a road so cars can drive faster. We don't really care about the homes on this street. And one more thing we advice you not to walk around your neighborhood anymore and begin to use your car for all your errands.
and thats wrong how?
@@Joecrouse Because fast moving vehicles can kill you?
@@Joecrouse cope and seethe , car brain
@@xoranginho Did you hear a word he said? "Be kind, thoughtful, and generous of spirit"?
@@mobilityproject3485 was that an order?
This conversation is too realistic and therefore upsetting. Most people I talk to think this way. This world sucks.
Outstanding. I had not seen this before. Thank you to Strong Towns, and to Not Just Bikes UA-cam for the link.
A-men... chillingly true, can think of streets in every city I've lived that have been redesigned for death and decay.
Traffic engineers have wrecked American life.
Still applicable in 2023 😢
Oh.... 😞. Here in Germany we also suffer from such nonsense. Ugly streets and trees seen as a danger for cars, ruining the old part of cities and villages by allowing to build shopping mals outside the towns... And the way to make people poor who have property on the side of the street: Here its called "Straßenausbaubeitrag" and it has ruined already a lot of poorer Houseowners. /// Streets are made for cars- More streets more cars. Germany is one of those shitty car-countries in the world and it is a shame how everything developes.
if you want to know how unsafe my city is with it's driving, let me tell you this... it hosts a indie 500 through the CBD... through the center of the capital of the state, and yes... they do get up to 200kph at some points so it says that it's difficult enough to be a challenge but easy enough to be a racetrack.
Oh, and since my last post, we now have 6 cigarette stores and 14 convenience stores, along with a bunch of other useless garbage and the traffic to go with it.
Detroit in the 50's
Actually I just finished the part with the "tax subsidy zone"... Make that Detroit right now
Nah it's 99% of cities in North America today
This is hilarious. And tragic. And infuriating. And true.
Lord have mercy.
Beautiful suburbs of Philadelphia have been ruined this way. Beautiful Victorian mansions are now empty bc there’s one of these roads in the front yard
I can't got over how adorable this looks
Wow, well done. Pithy. Hard to watch because of the upsetting but true ideas. The text to speech is a good way to do this.
@nick00goku Sorry, but cars moving faster in our cities is a problem. What are you doing to change the tragedy of around 40,000 people per year killed in the USA each year? That's something that touches us all. Engineering can help by calming traffic in cities.
"that is the standard" is such a great excuse for an engineer to not think.
"Slowing down the cars would not be safe" sounds absolutely silly.
Of course when I say best practice in this scenario, we are talking about a discipline of civil engineering. Best practices vary from discipline to discipline, not just in engineering.
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
this is a throwback
a little anticlimactic at the end... i was also expecting the woman to burst out angrily. still this video is definitely thought provoking.
@axlotl1031 I don't agree--yes, she is talking about her own neighborhood and family, but it's better for all of us if fewer people are killed by cars. The cheapest and best way to do this is to reduce speeds in cities and towns. This video ties together a number of complex issues about planning--to do so without demonizing someone who is trying to simplify the issue would be hard.
I won't pretend there isn't bad city planning.
If you won't pretend peoples desire to live in small suburban communities and commute to work doesn't create traffic congestion.
The bad suburban community planning leads to the traffic congestion.
I was about to complain about this engineer until I saw what channel this was and realized you already knew
He sounds more like a bureaucrat than an engineer
Wait until you find out they reinforce each other's actions.
The street is not safe
That's why it must be up to standard 🤖
Came here after reading the book.
I am with the resident, the engineer is a fool that works for an over bloated government agency that wants to legislate urban planning, very sad and very real. Are are working for them, are you one of them?
I would like to meet the 89 engineers who gave this video a thumbs down ...
focus on us traffic engineers who agree with Chuck...we'll be there fighting for more sane policies and designs with you.
This must be a DOT engineer. I think a consultant would have more sense than this.
As an engineer, I have to say the idiot making the changes and plans is not an engineer. He's a politician. The woman asking the questions has more in common with engineers than the other character.
Depends on the Urban Planner ... many planners today are influenced by Jane Jacobs, who advocated for all things communal and residential.
This is an engineer, not a planner. Planning is doing its best to drop engineering's mechanical approach to humans that it held for the second half of the 20th century.
@@TheSpecialJ11 Many planners often the ones imposing R1 zoning, parking requirments ect
"mongodb is web scale, you turn it on and it scales right up"
Set the speed limit to 80 mph everywhere.
The 12 people who disliked this video are the engineers that had this idea. :P
in reality some engineer wrote this idea in the 50's and no engineer has actually though about anything but how fast can we move cars sense
Are you also here from The Urbanist Agenda? Video is still relevant in 2023😢
I get it. I guess you need to understand the relationship between engineers and customers.
if i understand that means that the guy that makes pizza next street is a hero cauz he makes pizza while not eating any... wow congrats engineers
What? Engineering isn't political! How can maths be political? What's this thing 'induced demand'? Something we've known about for almost a century? Oh. oh....
I will go to the website it suggested
23 people haven't owned their own homes or had children yet.
Man, all politicians are like this >.
That's government by the politician and special interest. Both democrats and republicans.
We need government by and for the people.
My children play in the clear zone😂
@canon914 Actually, she is complaining about investments that won't give any (as in $0) returns over the course of 10 to 15 year, then after that time they start paying taxes (but by that time the roads in the new section of town will probably be needing repairs so overall they won't contribute anything but will actually cost the town money). The business will close because nobody would walk across the 4-lane high traffic street, once you're driving you'll probably go to a larger store.
Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads. BttF
Jeez this is still an issue today. Its pathetic we haven't learned a thing at all.
The standard....
this is utterly painful.
So so true... Sadly...
@jabrett I do. I walked to get Indian for lunch on Saturday, and I usually walk over to the grocery store for something or other at least once a week.
It will meet the fucking standard, don't you understand?! Jeez
I have the robot cadence stuck in my head hahahaha
That's a legitimate problem, slowing cars down for stupid reasons will improve safety.
Then why isn't it titled that way? The tone of the dialog sure doesn't match what you say.
AASHTO is a guideline. Engineers can deviate when justified. That's why there is an experimental process to try out new things. The latest AASHTO guide reflects this.
This is exactly like the inspectors I deal with everyday. It would be a lot funnier if it wasn't true.
Sounds like something citizens of a simcity would talk about after the user deiced to place a 6 lane speedway through a suburb!
Amazing.
@Konman91316 Now that the car manufacturers are less politically powerful, those selling public transit should make their move.
That's a good one!
Why do so many people have problems with results of scientific study and progress? The fact that some are willing to sit by and watch as their community CONTINUE to decay without making change is astounding. Leave it to the professionals.
You'd be surprised by how often those "projections" are off, and how often we build roads with far more capacity than will ever need. This means more expensive at first, more expensive to maintain, and comes with safety problems and can lead to a spiraling cycle of needing more infrastructure like signals just to appease the residents.
I'm one of those professionals, and this video and Smart Towns hits the nail on the head. Those studies are far from scientific.
Strong towns is an organization that evaluates such projects and does real research. They are professionals(and ex professionals) and they fight for improvement in cities not dangerous road expansions and reckless spending.
Raming a fucking highway right through the neighborhood and destroying thousands of homes, businesses, churches, parks, and community centers for a road that will eventually get traffic jams in 3 years is progress? High traffic accidents and fatalities, unsafe street, noise and air pollution, increase carbon emission, worsening metal health, and destroying generational wealth are progress?
Scientific study and progress has spoken, and it said that generally fucking shit up for the inside of town to connect people to a tax subsidy zone at the edge of town isn't a good idea
Jevons paradox easily explained....
She’s right you know ?
People moving frim Cal to our towns in NV,
Remake this with actual people talking! The words are great, but this format was terrible 12 years ago; nowadays it's downright painful. :s
"the standard" ha ha
Up to standard 🤖
who here from the end of design appreciation i time traveled back
This has little to do with engineering.
This is all urban planning and department of transportation.
My father, uncle, wife, son, cousins, and friends are engineers.
Most engineers I know think the WA department of transportation should be dis banned and rebuilt from scratch.
Stop go traffic can be calculated by the interest on the money per square foot of freeway compared to the average gas tax per vehicle per day.
We need cheaper freeways.
lol go watch mine..it was my first time making one..it also has something to do with driving. Mine is with the dummy though.
This sounds exactly like ChatGPT
This is so crazy
Engineers are like robots
she should have punched him in the face at the end