rando

originally in "Governing" magazine, 2005, written by Christopher Swope.

Rethinking the Urban Speedway

Take a ride through Trenton with Gary Toth and Yosry Bekhiet, and you might conclude that these two highway engineers are the last New Jersey drivers who stick to posted speed limits. Bekhiet, behind the wheel of a state-issue Chevy Cavalier, accelerates up a ramp onto the city's downtown expressway, and then holds steady in the right lane at exactly 50 miles per hour. Toth, in the passenger seat, points out the gold dome of the state capitol as other cars fly past the white Chevy. "I drive this road at 50," Toth says, "and people pass me going 75."

State Route 29 through Trenton, like most roads in the United States, was built for speed. The engineers who designed it back in the 1950s had a hunch that motorists might race a little. So for safety's sake, they made the road a bit straighter and the lanes a tad wider than the speed limit suggested was necessary. Engineers at the time believed this to be prudent design - and many of their contemporaries would still agree with that assessment. For most of their long careers with New Jersey's Department of Transportation, this is what Toth and Bekhiet believed, too.

But lately, the two engineers have become convinced that supersizing Route 29 only made it more dangerous. Designing for the speediest drivers, they now believe, simply encouraged people to drive even faster. They note that recent accidents along a short stretch have killed six people. "The traditional engineering solution to road problems is to make the road wider, straighter and faster," Toth says. "Well, wider, straighter and faster is not always better."

Toth and Bekhiet have developed other objections to Route 29's design. The first is a matter of traffic flow. There are only a few spots where drivers can get on or off the highway. This means that Route 29 shoulders nearly all of the burden of moving cars through Trenton. When the road clogs up at rush hour or after a minor-league baseball game, drivers don't have much choice but to wait out the jam. Their second complaint is Route 29's location. It sits on an embankment along the Delaware River, completely severing downtown Trenton from its waterfront. Thousands of state employees work in a building a stone's throw from the river's edge, but their view outside is all concrete and guardrails. "The Delaware River might as well be 100 miles away," Bekhiet says.

None of the engineers' criticisms of Route 29 are anything new. For 20 years, the city of Trenton has been begging the DOT to tear down this expressway. "It's the Indianapolis 500 out there," says Mayor Douglas Palmer. What is new, and is simply astonishing for anyone familiar with transportation policy to hear, is that it's the engineers themselves - finally - who are the ones saying it.

chipcom 

IMO the best engineers are those who are able to strike a balance between what is best from the purely technical design standpoint and what is best from a human reality standpoint. Bicycle helmets are a good example of this, albeit perhaps not the best implementation. The helmet has a technical job of absorbing an impact, but to do this 'best' the helmet would be heavy, bulky, hot and probably not used by most people, so the design compromises between 'best' and reality to come up with something that absorbs impact 'acceptably', while still being lightweight, streamlined and well ventilated. Building a better mousetrap is easy, building a better mousetrap that people can use and afford, while still doing the job it is intended for, is much harder.

bigpedaler

this strikes me as an example of the lowest common denominator, much like the idea someone local to me came up with -- so many people were running red lights, they built a 2-3 second delay into the green. now, as a result of that (drivers know about it), they run the reds 2-3 seconds later, still going through when the other way has the green! sure thing -- cave to the idiocy of reckless self-gratification.

(ohboy, people are speeding on our new highway -- we better make it safer for them to speed! GOOD IDEA!)

Dahon.Steve

LOL! They will NEVER tear down Rt 29 or Riverside Dr because it is a major expressway. The construction of that blight, I mean highway destroyed Trenton forever.

Brian Ratliff

An engineer's job is always to do the impossible. Take bike components. They have to weigh nothing, stand up to a lifetime of abuse without failure and with no adjustment, and cost no money. Given that none of this is possible, engineers are tasked to compromise as little as possible and still solve the problem.

The problem...

That's the tricky part. You wouldn't believe the amount of time engineers (at least at Oregon State University, my Alma Mater) spend being taught and practicing the process of setting up the problem. That's what we call it, at least. We have an entire class in this; it's called "statics" on the course description, but it is really all about learning to set up problems so that they can be solved in a straightforward and systematic way. The problem setup is always the tricky part of an engineering task. Get this wrong, and this is what the engineers did with the road described in the OP (with 20/20 hindsight, of course), and the result is unintended consequences.

But hindsight is 20/20. Another hallmark of the field is that engineers have to provide a solution to an undefined problem yesterday with no data.

genec

remsav

Sounds very similar to what they are doing locally, by converting 4 lane road into 3 lane supposedly to force people to slow down in that area to decrease the traffic accident. So it was 2lane road they increased to 3lane to 4 lane... now they are converting them back to 3 lanes... idiots.