Just before Thanksgiving, Strong Towns President Charles Marohn posted his Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, a critique of those in the engineering profession who cling to street design standards that prioritize automobile traffic and speed over all else — including what the community might value — and refuse to question the results. If you haven’t yet read the piece, it’s certainly worth a few minutes of your time.
Following up on that, Strong Towns created the below animation of a typical, frustrating conversation a resident may have with an engineer about a planned “improvements” to her street. Luckily, the fact that it’s two cutesy computer-animated dogs tempers the serious challenge of overcoming the flawed underpinnings of the engineer-dog’s reasoning, so feel free to giggle along.
Marohn is one of many thousands upon thousands of transportation professionals who are working to change how we approach transportation and community through planning and building complete streets that assume multimodalism and speak to community values. Many of these knowledgeable and inspiring professionals are active and vital members of the National Complete Streets Coalition, through organizations like the American Planning Association and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, creating new resources, undertaking research studies, and creating on-the-ground change in communities across the country. Leading consulting firms have made their support for change official by joining the Coalition, and the adoption of many state and local Complete Streets policies has been driven by local transportation professionals.
A select few of these game-changers have been trained as Complete Streets Workshop instructors. Michael Ronkin, who designed our Workshop program with Executive Director Barbara McCann and is one of our lead instructors, was caught on camera while spreading the Complete Streets word in Virginia Beach. He addresses the need for flexibility in design guidelines, creating a new vision for our transportation system, and a whole lot more. Check it out below, and contact us to bring him and other Complete Streets instructors to your community.