372 Pages

 My sister, like my mother, is a nurse. She started in university, as I did, as an engineering major, specifically biomedical, before deciding her real interest was biomedical, not engineering, and switching majors, as well as schools. Hey, I followed her lead there as well, transferring to become the slowest reader to ever pursue an English degree. Maybe it was genetic.

Slow readers make slow work of a book with 372 pages, not including "About the Author", acknowledgements, nor endnotes. I spent a bit of time sitting with Wes Marshall's Killed by a Traffic Engineer, but early in that going, I was thinking of my sister's job. While she started as a practicing nurse, that engineering mindset for systems didn't go away, and her career migrated to accident prevention. In her words, doctors are human, so they make mistakes. The solution is to design a system where it is harder for those mistakes to happen. Her field now is the one that developed stardards like having you marker your applicable body part before sedation for surgery. Systems work! As for me, the last business card of this person with a degree in English proclaimed "Project Engineer", although I consider fake engineer a more accurate title.

The book eventually arrived at the medical analogy in more ways than just this one I could refind.

(Drat, drat, and triple drat, in attempting to upload that last picture, I deleted somewhere around a thousand words, which doesn't feel like a fair trade right now. What follows is what I can reassemble from memory)

Marshall's book changed my impression of various road interactions over the past few weeks. I am a slow reader. In the past, I've mentioned the 85% rule, which was, hey, developed by traffic engineers and even expanded it with the posit that 85% of people are reasonable. Unfortunately, the remaining 15% have an outsized negative impact on the world. We really notice them, and it's easy to blame the conditions of the roads on them.

It seems traffic engineers do the say, claiming their road designs would be perfectly safe if there was better police enforcement and drivers education. It's not that the designs are bad. No, the world is imperfect, and that is the problem. Luckily, aerospace engineers, like my dad, don't complain that air weighs less than steel airframes. They design for the realities of the real world, and hey, a person is far more likely to die driving to their nearest airport than flying across the country. Designing for the real world, and the realities of the people living in it works. Traffic engineers need to learn that.

372 pages took me weeks to read, and there are possibly that many posts to share as well. After all, I write pretty slowly as well, especially when I delete the majority of what I wrote right at the end. Don't worry, or maybe do, I'll have more reactions to share here, or at least delete into the ether.