On engineers, politicians, and pohutukawas

We’ve started off 2015 with some good transport news – the Government’s announcement of the first urban cycleway projects, including the brilliant Nelson St offramp project, and Auckland Transport’s interesting proposal for light rail in the old tramway suburbs.

However, there is a big thistle in this bouquet of roses: AT’s proposal to cut down a stand of old pohutukawas to widen the St Lukes intersection. The other week, Patrick aroused a great deal of angst with his report on AT’s consultation meeting, in which he “accuse[d] those responsible for this outcome of professional incompetence”. Matt followed that up with a thoughtful piece that argued that the issue has aroused such passions among Aucklanders because we expect better of our transport agencies and elected representatives.

Now, I haven’t been involved in this project at any level, so I don’t know why AT chose this design. But this does not look like a good use of urban space to me. In my view, if Auckland wants to be the world’s most liveable city, it has to do better than unhospitable seas of asphalt like this.

But that’s just my personal view, and reasonable people could disagree with me. I don’t particularly want to jump into the debate over whether this is a good project, a bad project, or an argument for outsourcing all our traffic engineering to the Netherlands. Rather, I’d like to approach the issue from a higher altitude, and ask:

What does this project say about the relationship between our engineers, our politicians, and the public? What needs to change about that relationship?

While Patrick and Matt focused on AT’s conduct, it was also remarkable that Auckland Council politicians and Auckland Transport board members – with some honourable exceptions – remained silent about the pohutukawas.

This was disappointing, as we elect Councillors and appoint board members precisely so they can represent the public interest on tricky policy matters. It’s also a bit surprising, given the alacrity with which Councillors and local board members have reacted to other contentious issues like the Unitary Plan. (And the speed at which they race to the scene of cycleway openings.)

Now, I tend to be an optimist about democratic processes and public policy-making. I like to think that if the politicians or board members expressed a strong view that the project should be done differently, then the engineers would go back to the drawing board and design something different.

With a better brief, and strong instructions to follow it, the result could be much better. There are many examples of great engineering, even in Auckland, that illustrate how engineering can be a creative, imaginative, and constructive act.

So why was this design advanced? From the outside, it looks like there may have been two sins of omission: On the one hand, politicians seem to find it hard to question the experts, even when the results look a bit dodgy. On the other hand, traffic engineers are sometimes inattentive to the social, economic, and environmental context in which they work.

Fortunately, these are fixable problems. If our public servants – politicians and AT engineers alike – raise their game, we will get better outcomes. Here, I want to suggest a couple of ideas that could help improve matters.

First and foremost, politicians need to treat engineering recommendations with a bit of healthy skepticism. Engineers are hardly infallible: they are simply a group of people applying a set of tools and methods that have weaknesses and blind spots.

It’s important to be aware of these weaknesses. In particular, don’t trust the traffic models. They are not prophesies handed down from the Oracle at Delphi. They have been wrong in the past, and will be wrong again.  “The model says it will get worse in ten years” is not necessarily a good reason to spend tens of millions of dollars now.

Likewise, the traffic engineering discipline, like any profession, has some unacknowledged blind spots. It consistently underestimates induced demand, blatantly ignores pedestrian and cyclist behaviour, and recommends standards that result in perverse outcomes. If it looks like the engineers have missed something important in their design, they might very well have! So don’t be afraid to ask them to fix it.

However, don’t ignore them entirely, either. Engineers are, after all, professionals with professional ethics and knowledge in the field. They are good at identifying the trade-offs between different designs. If they say that two desirable outcomes are mutually incompatible, or achievable only at great cost, it’s worth hearing that. But I don’t think that it’s appropriate for elected representatives to delegate the authority to resolve those trade-offs to the engineers. After all, we elected them to make hard choices on our behalf.

Second, the engineers also have to raise their game. They cannot hide behind the excuse that they simply “designed to meet the brief”. For one thing, engineers often help to write the brief – as the experts, they are consulted on what the project requirements should be. (This is not a bad thing, per se. In my experience, asking the experts what’s possible before asking them to do the impossible can save a lot of time and money.)

For another, a project brief is only a piece of paper. The quality of the places that we build and the happiness of the people that use them are the really important outcomes. If we want Auckland to be a good city to live in, building good urban places has to be a bottom line for engineers.

In other words, I think that traffic engineers need to pay attention to their social responsibilities. Road design has incredibly important effects on our economic, social, and environmental wellbeing. A bad road can cut people off from the world, and choke them with pollution. A good street can open up new possibilities for them. This is important, and AT needs to acknowledge it in every damn intersection they build.

In short: everyone needs to take responsibility for what they’re doing.

Lastly, I’m not beating up on traffic engineering here. Many of the points that I’m making arose from conversations with engineers. I would make the exact same recommendations to my fellow economists and to the policymakers that rely on our advice. They are just good practice.

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