I saw this article from Governing and I thought of two things in this order:
This is really interesting research and an interesting paradigm to rethink the teams that make transportation decisions. I agree with the author’s interpretation and the original research inputs, controls, methods, and outcomes.
This research is completely bunk and is already in the ether.
Here’s what did it for me—this chart is ridiculous. First of all, it’s too complicated. If I’m reading this correctly, education is the most important individual effort you can take but has the least impact on the population's health. Are these two factors related? I don’t think so, but there’s got to be a better way to show this.
Luckily, the authors of the original paper offered a different solution.
Oh, we’re just doing semantics. Nonsense charts aside, I think the biggest problem with this new paradigm—even if I think it’s right, and I do!—is that it assumes that engineers and policymakers care, at all, about the hierarchies listed above. If your goal is to build more roads faster so drivers can drive; that’s your educational focus, and the focus of the program that’s taught you how to build; that’s the focus of the state DOT’s capital plan and all sub-state input; that’s what you’re going to get. (We all just need a Norman Garrick to teach us.)
The chart really looks like this:
Tongue-in-cheek aside, we really need to get at the root of the issue: funding priority, communications campaigns, and a reason for people to care, otherwise there’s simply two wars happening, and only one side really playing. I’m planning to write something longer about this but my gears are always grinding about this.