Summary of Charles L. Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 On December 3, 2014, Sagrario Gonzalez was leaving the Central Library in Springfield, Massachusetts, with her niece and daughter. She chose to take the quicker path across State Street, instead of the safer one through the grass. She was struck and killed by a vehicle.

#2 What happened that night on State Street seems clear. Gonzalez made a series of bad choices. She could have walked to the traffic signal, but she didn’t. She crossed mid-block instead, which was extremely dangerous. She did it to save a couple minutes of time.

#3 The underlying values of traffic engineering are so deep, and so core to the profession, that practitioners do not consider them values. They bristle at the suggestion that these values are anything but self-evident truths.

#4 The design speed is the third step in the street design process, and is solely the responsibility of the engineer. It is an application of core values that selects among different, competing priorities. The engineer decides how much traffic the street will accommodate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669375036

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Insights on Charles L. Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

On December 3, 2014, Sagrario Gonzalez was leaving the Central Library in Springfield, Massachusetts, with her niece and daughter. She chose to take the quicker path across State Street, instead of the safer one through the grass. She was struck and killed by a vehicle.

#2

What happened that night on State Street seems clear. Gonzalez made a series of bad choices. She could have walked to the traffic signal, but she didn’t. She crossed mid-block instead, which was extremely dangerous. She did it to save a couple minutes of time.

#3

The underlying values of traffic engineering are so deep, and so core to the profession, that practitioners do not consider them values. They bristle at the suggestion that these values are anything but self-evident truths.

#4

The design speed is the third step in the street design process, and is solely the responsibility of the engineer. It is an application of core values that selects among different, competing priorities. The engineer decides how much traffic the street will accommodate.

#5

The traffic engineering profession's values are traffic speed, traffic volume, safety, and cost. In order of importance, those values are traffic speed, traffic volume, safety, and cost.

#6

The values applied to street design are not values that most people would identify with. Most people would consider sacrificing the safety of the street to be counterproductive.

#7

The word improvement is often used to describe projects that remove trees from residential streets to make them faster. But for those who live near the streets, it is a diminishment.

#8

When engineers do not recognize their own values and how they are being projected in the words they use, we must help them recognize them by correcting their language.

#9

The field of transportation engineering and planning has its own biased language. The words and phrases used within the field were developed between 1910 and 1965, when the golden age of the automobile in the United States was.