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This is Science Friday. I'm Flor Lickman. Today in the podcast, are we in the dark ages of traffic engineering?

Where people are actually dying or having severe injuries,

those tend to be the roads that have most of our engineering science put into them.

When you see a car crash on the road, you might wonder which driver was at fault. But what

if that's not the right way to think about it? What if that crash could have

been avoided entirely if the roads were designed better, designed with more updated science

and data in mind? That's the thesis of my next guest, Dr. West Marshall, a professor of civil

engineering at the University of Colorado, Denver. He's a traffic engineer who wrote a book

called killed by a traffic engineer, which digs into the standards that have dictated traffic

design for decades to find out exactly how much science they're based on. Spoiler alert,

it's a lot less than you'd think or probably want. Dr. Marshall, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

Okay, you go really hard in this book. Like, you're quite critical of your own field. The driving

gloves come off. Why did you feel compelled to write it? Um, anger, maybe a little bit. Now,

I mean, no, I mean, really, I've been doing research, I mean, for decades.

And I feel like a lot of that stuff is good, but it's sort of chipping away the tip of the

iceberg.

So what I was learning, I mean, the deep right dug is that foundation was really where the

problems were.

So it needed to be something bigger.

And I'm also not really wanting to pull punches on

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