Summary of Charles L. Marohn's Confessions of a Recovering Engineer

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 On December 3, 2014, Sagrario Gonzalez was leaving the Central Library in Springfield, Massachusetts, with her niece and daughter.

She chose to take the quicker path across State Street, instead of the safer one through the grass.

She was struck and killed by a vehicle.#2 What happened that night on State Street seems clear.

Gonzalez made a series of bad choices. She could have walked to the traffic signal, but she didn't.

She crossed mid-block instead, which was extremely dangerous.

She did it to save a couple minutes of time.#3 The underlying values of traffic engineering are so deep, and so core to the profession, that practitioners do not consider them values.

They bristle at the suggestion that these values are anything but self-evident truths.#4 The design speed is the third step in the street design process, and is solely the responsibility of the engineer.

It is an application of core values that selects among different, competing priorities.

The engineer decides how much traffic the street will accommodate.