by alima
Traffic engineers are being marginalized and viewed as anachronisms, like Mad Men from a bygone age. As Christopher B. Leinberger, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and professor of planning at the University of Michigan, writes in a recent NY Times op-ed, “traffic engineers dismissively call [bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements] ‘alternative transportation.’”
In saying so, he, and planners around the world, are being dismissive of me and my profession. We are the GEICO Neanderthals of society.
And who’s to blame? Yes, we deserve a lot of it. We, as a profession, continued to build more roads, wider roads, and faster roads while knowing full well we were running out of capacity and making transport systems less efficient.
An example I’ve used time and time again in New York City is that the Brooklyn Bridge, when it was largely a rail and walking bridge, handled 430,000 people daily. In the 1940’s, we ‘modernized’ it by removing the rail; its daily person carrying volume dropped to 180,000.
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Biking in Baltimore