Roadways for People is Mainly for Engineering Students

Politicians often publish when they are launching a campaign.

When I saw news last year about Roadways for People, Lynn Peterson's book, and she scheduled a few book lectures around the valley, the package seemed like a clear launch for her campaign for the 5th Congressional District.

A friend of the blog attended one of the talks, and passed along a copy of the book.

But the tone of the book didn't align with a campaign launch.

In the review at BikePortland, they say

It took me a while to figure out who was the intended audience [is]....

The short answer is, “probably not you.” The book is the collected wisdom of an accomplished mid-career professional, and would make a wonderful text for a graduate-level course titled Engineering 240: Transportation and Community Engagement.

This is understatement! The book is narrowly and clearly aimed at the textbook market, not at all something for any general reader. Peterson often addresses a "you" obviously intended and defined in context as engineering students. She's at the lectern in front of students.

In the end the book is not nearly as interesting as it could have been, and it is meaningfully biased. As BikePortland says about the discussion of the I-5 Rose Quarter project, 

I become aware of the accumulating errors of omission. For example, in Peterson’s discussion of “deep-listening” to the community, “community” always seems to mean Albina Vision Trust, the nonprofit that seeks to redevelop Albina and that Peterson hitched her position on the project to. But when invoking “community,” Peterson never mentions No More Freeways, the protesting students at Harriet Tubman Middle School, the Eliot Neighborhood, the Sunrise Movement. None of them make the book. She excises global warming from the discussion.

There might be pedagogical reasons for that, a clean simple narrative could be the easiest way to introduce the evolution of different programs for community engagement, but it strips the current Rose Quarter freeway expansion controversy of its flavor. It sanitizes a complicated story and makes it bland.

Strong Towns also reviewed it, unsurprisingly as Charles Marohn blurbed it on the back cover. But they offer merely a blandly agreeable summary.

I hoped to be able to say the book was interesting or helpful, but it is not much of either. Between the silence on climate, the still dominant autoism, and case studies mainly taken from large highway and rail projects, there isn't very much on smaller urban streets and stroads. Even the transit example is regional. "Roadways for people" means highways and other big projects and does not match the Portland street grid on the cover. It's not really anything helpful for something like advocacy oriented to our forthcoming Transportation System Plan update. (Though it could be helpful for City Staff and consultants.)

I can think of some narrow situations where I might reference the book again. Some bureaucratic procedures and jargon are explicated a little, and it is possible to imagine some future planning study that professes to use a certain method or invokes the jargon. The book could help engage or critique that.

Overall I don't really have more to add to the reviews at BikePortland and Strong Towns.

Peterson offers small, incremental improvements to the hydraulic autoism of traffic engineering, but no critique of the autoism itself. It's about improving outreach and building consent.