alt Hacker NewsI think Chuck Marone and his group make good points but their admonition by ASCE is also deserved. He really went too far with disparaging the profession because of differences in purely value judgments. Furthermore, the type of infrastructure you get is a political decision. Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built. The “what” is never a designers decision.
Now I think this is a problem with reflecting on. Why is it that given the choice, many people with financial means move away from America’s cities? I did. I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
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Not liking Chuck Marone is irrelevant. The question is whether or not the thesis is correct, and it seems correct.
Everyone hates Nassim Taleb and he can be an asshole, but his math is impeccable. When your concern is with someone's personality because you don't like their math, then you've lost the plot.
The engineers are a big part of the problem and drive regulations that featherbed themselves.
I got into a fight with my city over nonexistent crosswalks (the adhesive line strips wore off) near my home in an area where drivers have a hard time realizing where pedestrians cross due to a unique road setup.
You can’t just paint lines. The project ended up costing about $1.2M and required a traffic study, some stupid ADA assessment and accommodation that frankly any layperson could have figured out, and a complete streets assessment.
Basically, they sent out a few engineering technicians who make $20/hr, billed out 80 hours at $120 to count cars and people, and printed some boilerplate analysis (@$250/hr). The end result was they painted new crosswalks and added textured curb surfaces for ADA compliance, which allowed for the use of recovery act funds.
>I promise you the reasons have nothing to do with zoning.
I am willing to guess they probably did, even if it doesn't seem directly related.
> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.
I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.
And yes city politics is separately a major problem.