Live shot of a hit-and-run happening behind a TV reporter covering the "most dangerous street in Los Angeles"

I remember years ago being in Barrio Logan in San Diego, and seeing two cars collide in an intersection. They both kept going. I can’t know why, but I suspect that if you have a few warrants outstanding, you might not want the cops or insurance involved.

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“Something outside my control happened so I crashed and it’s not my fault.” Every reckless driver ever.

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I take it there aren’t mandatory vehicle checks every two years where you live?

What has always rubbed me the wrong way about Jane Jacobs is she is the classic example of somebody with no expertise saying “the experts don’t know what they are talking about!” This happens oh so much, as we know with various pundits on the pandemic. I can respect an unorthodox person who has the required training and still rejects what they were taught, but the idea that somebody would dismiss a field of engineering despite not knowing anything about it is just bogus.

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Forgive me, I am not familiar with Jane Jacobs, but this specific opinion as expressed in that quote is bullshit. Traffic engineering is absolutely a real discipline (it is a specialty of civil engineering) and universities don’t give out degrees willy nilly. What is her evidence that this expertise isn’t real? Clearly she doesn’t like them, but what is her evidence that municipalities let them run wild and do “whatever they please”? Any civil engineer will tell you the opposite- the hard part of the job is getting naïve elected politicians to enact evidence-based policy on civil engineering matters.

That’s a really bizarre opinion to state like that. She thinks North Americans put too much faith in science, apparently? What the hell does that even mean? I assume she presents data that specifically people from Canada, the US, and Mexico are somehow different than Europeans or Asians or others in this weirdly-specific way? What method other than science would she suggest for studying traffic? Every sentence in that pull quote is nonsense.

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Someone backed into my parked truck in a parking lot and ripped off the plate. There was some other minor damage to both vehicles so cops were called and there was a report. It threw the plate on the passenger seat.

When I left to go home i got maybe half a mile before a different cop pulled me over for no front plate. I was confused for a minute thinking he was asking follow up questions but no, he just gave me a ticket.

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Someone backed into my parked truck at the farmers market and messed up my front end and the plate a bit. He was making a delivery to a vendor and was super freaked out, I think he might have been driving w/o a license or undocumented or something. So I just asked for a bunch of onions from one of his crates and called it good.
Way better outcome than yours! ACAB.

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Glad I read to the end before replying. Classic Dunning Kruger.

As an engineer myself - not in this discipline; mine is even more obscure - I encounter this regularly from those who are simply positive that they could do my job better after a weekend seminar.

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She’s one of the foremost urbanists of the last century, the nemesis of Robert Moses and car culture. She was also an activist who led the movements to stop the expressways that would have gutted Manhattan and Toronto. There’s no doubt that she made sweeping statements like this but she was coming from decades of observing and collecting stories of a lot really objectively bad real-life decisions made by traffic engineers in North American cities.

Her central thesis was always that municipal officials (elected and unelected) in the post-war period in N. America prioritised cars over pedestrians and bikes. Her claim was that traffic engineering came to be mainly to give a sheen of respectability to the political mandates of promoting car culture and associated budgetary budget cutting. In her view, they’re allowed to run wild in the details as long as they’re generally in line with those priorities.

So she’d cite things like missing but obviously needed stop signs, where community activists woulybe told by city official "can’t do it. We reallywant to [they didn’t] but our traffic engineer says that according to his educated assessment it would be cause more problems than it would solve [unsaid: for cars and/or our budget].

Too much blind faith in scientific and technological credentials, without looking much deeper. She had great respect for actual scientific expertise and academic research but believed that in North America it often became used as a catspaw or cover for decisions based on mainly economic decisions.

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This was my first thought while reading it. I’m near Philly, where they installed new signs attempting to describe what drivers are encountering on I-95. I would’ve found “weave area” to be mildly amusing if it wasn’t so scary and dangerous to navigate.

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I mean, sure, car culture got out of hand in many big cities- on that I agree with her. However, if this is how she makes her case, I’m unimpressed. Regardless of whether I agree with someone, I’m not going to listen if they speak entirely in unsourced and unsupportable hyperbolic opinion.

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She’s definitely not writing as an academic researcher. She also doubtless tends toward big-picture stuff and was known for painting with a broad brush.

I will say that she consistently held her own against traffic engineers and their studies in her various battles with car-focused municipalities. And she’s arguably the individual most responsible for the move over the past couple of decades toward walkable and bikeable cities and neighbourhoods (and fewer expressways) we’re seeing in the U.S. So she has gotten real-world results.

If she were still alive I think she’d have changed her mind somewhat seeing a new generation of traffic engineers who don’t always put the car first actually implementing her ideas.

Still, there there are far too many who allow and provide justification for dangerous intersections like the one in this story to continue to exist unfixed.

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Having seen far too many results of bad decision-making in that profession…

Ill Allow It Spanish GIF

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Bad signage or lack of signage was one of her peeves. Some planners seem to believe that cars were autonomous decades ago, because their design and placement often seems to be predicated on the belief that it is the vehicles and not the humans driving them that are reading them.

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I only know of Jacobs from Death and Life, which is all about demolishing the presumed expertise of town planners, in a way that remains persuasive 50 or so years later. I am guessing she tried to repeat the formula with traffic engineering, but that is a different kettle of fish, and the quote is very citation-needing.

If we’re talking about safety, traffic engineers are definitely who you want in charge; they work from actual data and if they say a junction needs to be at a 30° angle or whatever, it’s because they can show the math for why that will cause fewer deaths, and if their reasoning is wrong it’s still demonstrably the least wrong of available options.

When it comes to planning, there may be more of an argument. Like, if engineers say that a new tunnel right next to the existing Blackwall tunnel will ease congestion in London, I assume that’s narrowly correct, but it doesn’t address how this will affect future development, living costs, pollution etc. in a wider sense. So there might be a critique there, but it’s still not about whether traffic engineers’ expertise is real; it’s about whether the questions they can answer are the ones that matter.

Most of the reaction against neoliberal technocracy isn’t really a rejection of expertise per se (or shouldn’t be). It comes from a generation of politicians who learned to weaponize expertise, by carefully picking which experts they asked. Like when Tony Blair wanted to introduce unlimited detention without trial for “terror” suspects, and his po-faced justification was “the police say it will make their jobs easier, and they know best”. Only that’s not what anyone asked. If you pull that shit often enough, of course casual viewers will learn to despise expert opinion.

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This was my feeling as well, from the quote. I’ll withhold further judgement until I’ve read more of her writing, but that one quote didn’t do her any favors. Dismissing entire fields of academic study as maniacal and illegitimate because you don’t like them is not someone who is going to get my attention easily. “Civil engineer” is certainly a more valid profession than “Urbanist”.

From what I’ve read her issue was with this particular sub-field of civil engineering. As I recall she felt it hadn’t earned its place as being worthy of being included under the broader discipline that had proved itself a societal benefit in other infrastructure projects.

Also, to be fair to her she mainly considered herself to be a writer and journalist first and an activist second. Others put her in the category of urbanist (really ur-urbanist) over the years as her work and activism effected real change.

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This is the crux of the matter. The defenses of her all seem to miss that who the engineers work for is critical. The engineers are providing a well-engineered solution to the needs and dictates of others. The problem lies with those directing the engineers: the planners.

I think you mean Vancouver. In Toronto, an expressway went straight downtown and along the waterfront until they buried some of it (they want to get rid of more of it). In Vancouver, the proposed expressway would have bisected Chinatown, Gastown and cut the city off from the waterfront. The engineers tried to sell it with pictures of thriving urban markets in the shadow of the three storey expressways they were planning, but the locals weren’t really having it. The result is that Vancouver is one of the few major cities in North America that doesn’t have expressways right into the downtown core.

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She ended up as one of the leaders of the opposition to the Spadina Expressway in Toronto (she moved there for personal reasons after living in NYC).

There’s no doubt she influenced the positive decisions in Vancouver, though.

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