Killed By Traffic Engineer Again with Wes Marshall

·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

Traffic engineers were taught that following protocols like level of service would create safer streets, but the opposite is often true.

Wes Marshall starts with the basics. He is a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado Denver, sitting in Denver as John welcomes him back live. John keeps it easy and asks Wes for the story behind the work people know, including the book Killed by a Traffic Engineer. Wes starts back east, in Watertown, Massachusetts, one of the towns on Boston's west side. Then the conversation turns to how Look Both Ways began. At the Good Roads Conference in Toronto, Wes and David ended up on a panel with real back-and-forth instead of canned answers. That part mattered. After drinks with the Good Roads guys, starting a podcast went from throwaway joke to maybe worth trying. David followed up later. Wes says he had only been half-serious, but the idea had enough pull that they spent a month or two sorting through names. Look Both Ways fit because the show could slow down and sit with transportation questions that look simple until people start talking. Wes wants nuance. He pushes back on the easy story where everyone is just against one thing, because streets rarely work that cleanly. John catches the joke in it, but the end lands on the sharper edge of the book. He reads the subtitle about shattering the delusion that science underlies the transportation system, then thanks Wes and the live chat. This is more hangout than lecture, with research, journalism, and conversation all rubbing up against each other.

As heard by us

A warm live conversation about Wes Marshall's route through civil engineering, books, and transportation podcasts.

A live conversation with Professor Wes Marshall traces a clear path from personal biography into transportation thinking, from his Watertown, Massachusetts roots to his work as a civil-engineering professor at the University of Colorado Denver and his book Killed by a Traffic…

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Why you'd press play

You get Wes Marshall's Boston-area-to-Denver backstory and the whiskey-loosened origin of Look Both Ways.

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