ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

I don't know how to describe it...but I think I've experienced it.

Before I became...for lack of a better term, radicalized...I too dreamt of networks of perfect wide roads connecting every part of the city easily and efficiently. I mean, we do the same thing here with transit networks. I suspect that is the same reason engineers want to do it for roads.

But you then you grew up and learned things, including but not limited to the fact that big wide roads are expensive. Engineers are supposed to be all about tradeoffs: in modern engineering, every component of every bridge is built just strong enough (plus a safety factor) to support the loads that particular component will experience. We don’t just pile up huge amounts of stone so that there is no possible way the bridge will collapse. If an engineer insisted on using 8 gauge wire everywhere in a house, they wouldn’t get very far. But apparently putting in 4-lane roads all over the place even where the traffic doesn’t come close to justifying it is just A-OK.

Why are road engineers allowed to be 12 year olds? (no disrespect intended to 12 year olds; but thinking that is perfectly fine in a 12 year old isn’t necessarily OK for an adult)

And yes, I remember being similar: on at least one occasion I drew up a subdivision plan which just had a whole bunch of houses connected to a freeway interchange. And at one time I thought office buildings should have one parking spot per employee, too. I was just thinking of the convenience when driving, not about the costs. So it’s not just you.

This is a good question.

Although one possibly relevant thing I've learned in the past 2-4 years or so...traffic engineers are far from the only or most egregious examples of people not growing up. Look no further than the tantrums around vaccination to find truly toddler-esque adults.

It is easy to set standards for say...structural engineering. You can model a building or a bridge, estimate the dead and live loads, see the transfer of forces. It all follows a natural model.

The same is much harder, or even untrue for roads. You are modelling human behaviour, which unlike the forces of our universe, respond to our policies. If you build a bridge under strength, the force of gravity will not reduce to compensate. If you build a road with "too narrow" lanes the humans operating vehicles on it will slow down to compensate.

I'd argue that most fields of engineering lack a focus on human factors engineering--one only needs to try and use my washer to understand this, but few other fields have such a devastating impact on people and cities because of that lack of focus.

It's interesting, you look at the cockpit of an airplane, and you see ugly switches and dials everywhere, it looks like no designer has ever looked at a plane. It certainly is not as sleek and beautiful as the interior of a Tesla. And yet, the airplane controls are designed extremely intentionally and extremely carefully in order to minimize user errors. Down to things like buttons which felt too similar and caused crashes when pilots actuated the wrong ones, are redesigned to be different. But rarely is that attention paid in automobiles, the Tesla with it's screens being a prime example.

So...not just traffic engineers. Heck, since this is the ION thread, go look at the driver's cab of the ION.