Annotated Table of Contents Killed by a Traffic Engineer Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System By Wes Marshall, PhD, PE
General Overview: For at least the first 1,000 years since Hippocrates, it wouldn't be hard to make a case that doctors killed more people than they saved. Traffic engineering is only 100 years old, and traffic engineers still kill more people than they save. This isn’t necessarily the fault of today’s traffic engineers. They look at their thousand-page manuals and understandably think that the science behind traffic engineering is mostly settled. Unfortunately, the science is far from settled. Much of what traffic engineers do today was built on a rickety foundation of pseudo-scientific theories that prioritize speed, capacity, and driving over actual safety outcomes. Killed by a Traffic Engineer exposes the unscientific origin stories behind current standard practice and then sets forth a plan to fundamentally change the stateof-the-practice… and start to save lives. Killed by a Traffic Engineer is comprised of 88 short chapters organized into a dozen parts. The following overviews the 12 book sections:
Part 1: What Are We Doing Here? Killed by a Traffic Engineer starts off with stories that highlight the scale of the road safety problem, why so few people care, and why our historic focus on interventions such as Enforcement and Education are short-sighted and ineffective. It includes a chapter on “engineer speak” that lets the reader peak behind the curtain of the words that traffic engineers use when they want to shut the public up and continue with business as usual.
Part 2: Mismeasuring Safety It’s standard practice for traffic engineers to measure road safety outcomes in terms of how much we all drive. So instead of finding better safety with fewer crashes, injuries, and deaths, we can seemingly achieve better safety by simply driving more. Killed by a Traffic Engineer dives