Book Review: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

 

16th Avenue SW, Cedar Rapids

Charles L. Marohn Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, 2021.

What is the purpose of transportation? Charles Marohn's seminal contribution to this topic has been to note that it depends on where the transportation is occurring. Sometimes it is to get from one place to another quickly and safely; sometimes it is to get around within a productive place. In the first case, you want a road, with the best American examples being the interstate highways between metropolitan areas. Within places, you want a street that accommodates a variety of uses including but not limited to or even favoring automobiles.

America's greatest development mistake has been decades of urban design that practically makes a motor vehicle a requirement for participating in society, and results in streets that try to be roads at the same time: stroads are high-speed roads that also feature commercial development that draws a lot of auto traffic. They are financially unproductive, as he explored in his previous book, Strong Towns (Wiley, 2020), but they are also dangerous. (See especially chapter 2.) It is the safety (or lack thereof) of the places where people live that is the focus of the current book.

The statistical analysis and critical thinking that inform this work are framed by three powerful stories. In the introduction he recounts a conversation between pre-awakening Chuck and a woman whose property is about to be severely impacted by a road-widening project and who can't understand Chuck's explanation of why it will improve her life. (Spoiler alert: It won't improve her life, because, as he comes to realize, "improvements" like these make people's lives worse not better.) Then in chapter 1, we meet the Gonzalez family of Springfield, Massachusetts, whose daughter was killed by a car as they made their way from the public library to the parking lot; young Destiny is lifted from the bin of statistics to stand for all the people who are killed on stroads as they try to go about their daily lives. Finally, in the final chapter, Marohn recounts his own harrowing experience, as he too narrowly missed becoming a victim of design. These stories give life, meaning and purpose to the analysis.

Mt. Vernon Road SE near where two boys on a scooter were badly injured in June

Marohn's most important early premise is that transportation is not neutral, nor strictly technical as engineers might (and apparently do) conceive it. It is a question of values. If we design streets to move cars faster while putting everyone else at greater risk, that's a choice that reflects the city's values. Marohn's mission is to make explicit the values implicit in transportation design. Who matters? What matters?

His hope with this book is to introduce Americans to what previous generations enjoyed: "great streets" (the title of chapter 5). Great streets exist for the purpose of "wealth creation," which in turn "is really about building the capacity to endure over time" (pp. 66-67), allowing for adaptation over time, especially incremental growth. This only works when the growth occurs in ways that increase the city's assets faster than its liabilities: "A city can build miles of streets [to move a high volume of vehicles], but if there is not enough private sector investment on those streets to offset the ongoing maintenance costs, the community is merely growing poorer" (p. 68). Making a street a better place to live increases land value, and land value per acre is the quickest way to measure community wealth. Incremental growth, rather than frozen zoning or large-scale developments, is the way to do this:

Single-family homes add garage apartments or convert into duplexes. Duplexes are redeveloped to become fourplex units. Commercial buildings are subdivided to allow more tenants. Gaps are filled in. Space is used more productively. (p. 71)

We find ourselves back at the financial analysis of the first book. Marohn argues that transportation choices must serve this basic reality, but also that "a prerequisite for building wealth is that a street be safe" (p. 66). The traditional grid pattern does this; the arterial/collector system not only does not do this, it creates traffic congestion and the temptation to widen streets into stroads (ch. 6). He picks apart the analyses used to justify widening streets and bashing highways through towns (ch. 8). Roundabouts do this, if and only if correctly; traffic lights do not, and they waste time and encourage aggressive driving (ch. 7). Chapter 7 may deserve its own post, given that so many of my fellow Cedar Rapidians are convinced roundabouts are spawns of Satan.

In chapter 9, he uses the same logic to discuss public transit. This "is the only way to overcome the geometric space limitations of the street while still building wealth," because buses don't require huge parking lots, but only if it is run with a service orientation i.e. frequent and reliable runs between places of value: "All the public employees, lawyers, accountants, salespeople, clerks, and everyone else working in the core downtown should find it ridiculously convenient to board... and get to wherever they need to be to conduct business in the core downtown" (p. 157). Cedar Rapids's coverage orientation means buses spend a lot of time and money serving areas with few riders, making transit a drain on resources at the same time it is a non-starter for all but the truly desperate.

These are the highlights of a book that dips into additional transportation-related topics like scooters, rideshare, the impractical ideas of Elon Musk, and why police should discontinue routine traffic stops. All are in service of making transportation work, in a safe, financially-sound way, to build communities for people. I could use fewer long block quotes from the first book, which is consistently referred to with its full title and subtitle, but on the whole Marohn is a fluent and passionate writer with a lot of hard evidence to support his arguments.