Originally Posted by
trsidn
But, as a traffic engineer (who rides bikes) I can tell you, we can recommend all day long, but the legislature is under no obligation to implement recommendations.
Statutory requirements are almost entirely based on recommendations from the traffic engineering profession. The U.S. traffic engineering profession, including NACTO, AASHTO, and FHWA, have given the U.S. the most dangerous road system of all developed countries (though Greece occasionally gives us a run for our last place money). That's not something to be proud of.
A Federal court just sided against WisDOT on 15 years of unrealistic traffic projections they were using to justify a road expansion project and the judge added in his remarks that his regard for traffic engineers, given how poorly we rate safety wise compared to other countries, is quite low.
Using statutory obstacles (which are based on traffic engineers recommendations) is a poor excuse. NACTO and a long line of traffic engineers constantly blaming our high fatality rates on drivers rather than poor road design is a poor excuse. The traffic engineering profession in the U.S. needs to fix itself before it looses all credibility and finds states and municipalities looking to engineers from overseas to fix our problems. [off my soapbox now]
I've worked with gobs of engineers from gobs of areas. I raced cars for a number of years as well as sailboats. I worked with bio-medical companies and companies that manufactured audio equipment. In all of these the engineers were laser focused on making things as good as they possibly could. Why can't U.S. traffic engineers be more like this?