The provided sources are a study guide and interview excerpts from the Strong Towns podcast featuring Wes Marshall, author of Killed By a Traffic Engineer, which offer a comprehensive critique of modern traffic engineering. Marshall argues that the discipline of traffic engineering, rather than individual engineers, is responsible for unsafe urban infrastructure because it relies on codified, unquestioned standards that prioritize speed and capacity over human safety. A core theme is the historical evolution where early, experimental road-building practices were rigidly adopted by subsequent generations, leading to dangerous outcomes reflected in the paradox that the most intensely engineered streets are often the most dangerous. The discussion also emphasizes the need to adopt new, public-health-oriented safety metrics, such as deaths per population, and move toward designing self-enforcing streets that naturally guide safe speeds.
