Here’s some engineer bashing from Strong Towns, this time accusing us of being serial killers of children:

• The engineering profession is so worried about liability if they vary from any highway design guideline, regardless of how ridiculous they are. Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time.

• Professional engineers here and elsewhere use “forgiving design” principles in urban areas where they do not apply. They systematically forgive the mistakes of drivers who stray from their lane or go off the roadway by designing systems where these common mistakes are anticipated and compensated for. They systematically show indifference to the easily anticipated mistakes of non-drivers. A kid playing in their yard chases a stray ball out into the street and gets run down. To the engineer, this is a non-foreseeable, non-preventable accident. For everyone else, we understand that cities are more than cars – they include people doing all kinds of complex things – and forgiving the common mistakes of ALL people is what a humane, decent professional does.

• Professional engineers claim that they cannot alter human behavior with their street designs. A highway lane width is 13 feet just the same as your local street lane width. There is often no appreciable difference in the cross section of a highway and a local street except for the posted speed limit, which is up to the police to enforce. (I wrote about this years ago.) Despite this, the engineers in this situation – knowing there was an obvious problem – as well as many others in similar situations, put their brains to work to come up with all kinds of ways to attempt to alter human behavior, but only for those humans outside of their automobiles.

This language is a little dramatic but the argument is justified. The field of engineering, and the education of engineers, is not supposed to be just about following design guidelines unquestioningly. It is supposed to be about understanding systems well enough to modify them and solve problems. But civil engineers are under a lot of economic pressure – we tend to be paid either by cash-strapped public agencies or by private land development interests engaged in ruthless competition. Under these conditions, following an established playbook is often the lowest stress, lowest risk, and most efficient way to get a job done.

There is a flip side to this though – the keepers of those playbooks have enormous power. Curating a collection of standard details and technical specifications doesn’t sound like a very glamorous job, but actually it is a very important one. If people are blindly following your playbook, you have a lot of responsibility – to use overly dramatic terms, you can either be the savior or the mass murderer of the children. You have the power to mainstream best practices and innovations from elsewhere. Then if there are some engineers downstream who choose not to think or are simply under too much pressure to think, they will blindly implement the right practices. So these are very important jobs, and they need to be filled with people who are very well educated in system thinking, are ethical, and are intellectually curious about what is going on outside their little corner of the world. A certain amount of experimentation needs to be done outside the playbook, and the playbook itself needs to be constantly challenged and revised as new and better approaches become available.