Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

Praise for CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING ENGINEER

“I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. It’s been more than a decade since its title essay rocked me to my core; reading it was my Meg Ryan When Harry Met Sally moment. Over the intervening years, Chuck’s message has become all the more necessary, and America may finally be ready for it.”
—JEFF SPECK, city planner and author of Walkable City and Walkable City Rules

“This should be required reading—and the default approach to transportation—for anyone who cares about building safe streets and strong communities, whether transportation engineers, urban planners, policymakers or advocates.”
—BETH OSBORNE, Director of Transportation for America

“Marohn shows how the manuals, standards, and professional practices of traffic engineering reflect judgments about who matters and who doesn’t—judgments that deserve to be visible so that we can all debate them.”
—JARRETT WALKER, transit planner and author of Human Transit

How American roads are designed and how we can do better

We all want to live in a place where the transportation system serves us. But with crumbling roads, skyrocketing costs, maddening amounts of congestion, thousands of traffic deaths each year, and unreliable public transit…it feels like the other way around. So who’s serving who?

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity Charles Marohn pulls back the curtain on the assumptions and approaches that go into building and managing America’s transportation systems. He demonstrates how, with a different approach, any community can spend less and provide transportation systems that make their residents safer, wealthier, healthier, and more prosperous.

Discover insider secrets of how America’s transportation system is designed, funded, and built – and how to make it work for your community

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn Jr. delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America’s transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.

You’ll discover real-world examples of poor design choices and how those choices have dramatic and tragic effects on the lives of the people who use them. You’ll also find case studies and examples of design improvements that have revitalized communities and improved safety.

This important book shows you:

• The values of the transportation professions, how they are applied in the design process, and how those priorities differ from those of the public.
• How the standard approach to transportation ensures the maximum amount of traffic congestion possible is created each day, and how to fight that congestion on a budget.
• Bottom-up techniques for spending less and getting higher returns on transportation projects, all while improving quality of life for residents.

Perfect for anyone interested in why transportation systems work – and fail to work – the way they do, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer is a fascinating insider’s peek behind the scenes of America’s transportation systems.