Much better than his previous book “Strong Towns” because of it’s narrower lens on transportation issues in North American cities. Marohn discusses how the engineering profession encultures it’s members to develop transportation systems designed exclusively for cars through higher education and financial incentives. In schools, civils engineers don’t focus on how streets are places that people live and build community, they are instead taught that streets are places that must move cars quickly and safely. These sorts of engineered streets are wide and have no obstructions which does make for a great environment when you’re in the (relative) safety of a multi-ton metal box moving at high speeds, but a terrible place for pedestrians or bikers. Many engineers believe that they’re just following the best practices, the “standards and codes” of their profession, but totally dismiss that those same standards result in the injury if not death of thousands each year.

Not only is this design philosophy perpetuated in education, it’s also fueled by the financial system behind transportation development. The states and federal government provide grants almost exclusively to incredibly massive transportation projects that involve adding lanes to existing roads and highways or building new ones that oftentimes go nowhere in particular. Engineers accept this system because they get paid regardless (sometimes as a percentage of anticipated cost of the project, which encourages them to rack up more expenses). Cities welcome this system because it gives them new expansion space which they need in order to bring in new tax dollars to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure that they built on a previous grant from the federal government. This is a constant cycle of debt that’s unsustainable.

If you can handle an author that is a little repetitive, quotes himself, and have a vague feeling that our cities could be built differently but don’t exactly have the language for what’s wrong then I’d recommend this book.

[3.8] I recently visited my Mom who lives in a region of California that’s functionally nothing more than pockets of suburbs. There’s sprawling roads seemingly to nowhere, but sprinkled throughout this vast network are standard North American cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods. On my previous visits I had a tough time articulating why exactly I dislike the area so much. After all, cost of living is so much lower in her area, and there’s still plenty of familiar retail and restaurant chains; why should I dislike it still so much? It all became clear to me when I discovered the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes,” a channel about urban planning and design. NJB points out how much of North American cities are designed exclusively with the privately owned car in mind, and how costly that can be. He did a series based on the commentary in this book, so I figured I ought to give it a read myself.

In Strong Towns, Marohn discusses how older cities were built specifically for humans (rather than cars) and how they were built gradually as people gained access to resources. Comparatively, modern neighborhoods are, as Marohn was oft to repeat a little too frequently, “built to a finished state.” Once built the developers leave and so begins the slow decline of the area, and now the local government is saddled with the maintenance costs for decades to come with no true means of paying for it. He describes how the need for cities to constantly grow to receive loans/grants from the state and federal government to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure is similar to a ponzi scheme. A constant cycle of pushing massive debts further and further down the line. It was an alarming and poignant perspective on the state of our cities, and left me with little hope for what needs to change to make things better.