I found the first Strong Towns book extremely compelling—it was a big part of the inspiration that led me to make Little Fixes. So I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, but when I started it a few months ago I switched to something else after the first few pages. It opens with a painful description of a tragic car-on-pedestrian collision and I wasn’t ready to read about more injuries and deaths on our streets at that point.

After starting again and finishing this time, this second Strong Towns book is much more somber than the first but just as interesting and equally well-reasoned. I didn’t feel quite as inspired as I did after reading the first—this one was perhaps a bit more intimidating—but that may also just be due to now being familiar with Strong Towns ideas. As an engineer with decades of experience, Marohn exposes several uncomfortable truths about the heavy-handedness with which engineers apply standards meant for isolated roads to local streets, destroying communities as they do so.

The book is filled with really excellent examples that highlight this mismatch between engineering optima and human optima, from analysis of traffic light timings in Marohn’s hometown to a detailed description of Springfield, Massachusetts’s main transit center. While reading, I found myself repeatedly impressed that Marohn was able to think of such perfect examples and use them so convincingly.

A couple parts seemed a bit over-the-top, and the book tended to be a bit repetitive of itself and of the first Strong Towns book (though this certainly helped drive the points home). The exploration of emerging transportation technologies towards the end was interesting but not particularly illuminating (and quite out of date in the self-driving section). I did, though, love learning the story of the Monkey Parking app: it so perfectly illustrates the absurdity of providing costly and limited parking to city residents for free.

I found it especially interesting to compare Marohn’s ideas in this book to the economist Alain Bertaud’s ideas in my last read, Order Without Design. Both books are rooted in economics, but come to very different conclusions about transportation. Marohn argues, with convincing numbers to back it up, that building wealth within communities, rather than encouraging long-distance travel to dispersed amenities, is crucial to building economically viable cities and towns. Meanwhile, though, Bertaud almost entirely disregards “amenities”—the local businesses like restaurants that Marohn argues are largely the source of this wealth—and argues that we should strive to enable people to travel as far as possible in as short a time as possible in order to enable access to the maximum quantity of jobs (placing the word “sprawl” in mocking quotations every time he mentions it). I don’t know how to reconcile these two viewpoints, and it almost feels like they are optimizing for entirely different, and perhaps incompatible, objective functions. I’m inclined to favor Marohn’s objective function, since it takes into account safety and aims to build places that I would want to live. But as someone who recently adopted an hour-long commute in an attempt to accommodate both work and life desires, I appreciate Bertaud’s point about the importance of access to specialized jobs.

Regardless of what the optimum transportation system looks like, there are clearly apparent problems of death, destruction, and wasted times in our transportation system. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer explores these problems from a purely systemic perspective, acknowledging that human participants in the system will inevitably make mistakes and bad decisions that the system must protect against. To me, this shows that Marohn is serious about fixing the problem and the rest of the book backs up that fact. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone that feels like something might be off with our transportation system.

Quotes

Do what you can, with what you have, to start building a strong town. If you do, I promise you will find you have everything you need.

Engineers tend to view cities as a collection of streets, pipes, and other infrastructure systems that can be managed like a machine, something they are uniquely able to fine-tune to optimum condition. This narrow frame of reference fails to acknowledge that cities are complex human habitats, places that evolve, where new patterns and responses emerge over time regardless of how the infrastructure is planned and constructed.

Way too many engineers fall back on the assertion that extensive deliberation is de facto evidence of a good approach.

… progress is different than momentum.

Traffic congestion has a calming effect on traffic.

This is, of course, quite obvious. But hearing it stated this way seemed insightful to me (especially when paired, as it was, with the statistic that traffic fatalities per mile driven jumped up drastically during the COVID lockdowns).

I find traffic signals maddening, perhaps the most casual waste of time and resources to come out of the profession of civil engineering.

Had [she] chosen to walk to the signalized intersection at Chestnut Street instead of attempting to cross State Street in front of the library, she would have been able to see up close the breakaway base at the bottom of the traffic signal. Just feet beneath where she would have pressed the button requesting permission to cross, the signal pole is attached to the ground with a series of shear pins. These pins are designed to shear off and allow the pole to collapse if struck by a motor vehicle traveling at sufficient speeds… There is a bench placed right next to this pole.