Traffic Engineers’ Epic Fail
Traffic engineers didn&#x27;t decide to put two different school across from one another. Perhaps they could have built the elementary school and high school on the same side of the street? Like say, in the giant empty field right there next to the school (pictured in the article).<p>Traffic engineers didn&#x27;t decide to put the school on a busy arterial State-Designated Highway. Syracuse Utah has just 6 main arterial roads, and over 50+ small slow neighborhood streets. 90% of the roads in this town are <i>already</i> slow side streets safe for children (the exact ones StrongTowns advocates for), why did they build the schools <i>exclusively</i> on the 5% of roads designated to handle actual traffic needs?<p>--<p>Ironically, we have a safer way to build streets like this. It&#x27;s called a freeway, and it&#x27;s great because it keeps nearly 100% grade-separation between people driving and people walking, while still handling massive transit requirements at high speeds.  But we can&#x27;t have those in cities, because StrongTowns hates them. They are too safe, promote affordable housing too much, and let people get to too many places too quickly.<p>StrongTowns gets the luxury of claiming every street should be impossible to drive on, and can prattle on about how cheap it is to destroy a street (it costs nothing!). Because StrongTowns does not do any actual engineering or design, they are simply a political campaign against cars.<p>Real traffic engineers have to actually handle transportation needs of real citizens everyday. Real traffic engineers don&#x27;t get the luxury of just wishing away peoples lives, or jobs, or homes. So while I&#x27;m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with traffic engineers work here.<p>I see a school system that decided building two schools on opposite sides of a &quot;State Highway 108&quot; was a great idea, and is now suffering terrible consequences because of it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Utah_State_Route_108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Utah_State_Route_108</a>