Road engineers 'invite crashes,' and a professor calls them to task

The primary role of a traffic engineer is ostensibly to promote safety on the road: a safer environment for drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians — the road users who every year suffer grievous injuries or death on highways.

But in an essay written for The Conversation website by Wesley Marshall, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado, the author argues that traffic engineers have a major responsibility for these accidents and injuries and ignore the real reasons for them.

His piece is titled, “Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data.”

“We underestimate our role in perpetuating bad outcomes, as well as the role that better engineering can play in designing safer communities and streets,“ Marshall writes.

He explains that ascribing fault for crashes to pedestrians, drivers, bikers — what he calls “road user error” — is a mistake, even though he cites a finding by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that calls road user error the “critical reason” behind 94 percent of crashes, injuries and deaths.