Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

Object all you want, I speak the truth, our roads are intended to kill people.

You're right, the engineers do suck.  If I was designing a road to intentionally kill people I could come up with infinitely better designs like spike pits after blind curves or something.

You're right, I misspoke, our roads are intended to kill exactly a specific number of people, in that aspect, our engineers do fine.  They can in fact predict the death and destruction a piece of infrastructure will see with a fair bit of precision.

Again, this is the ONLY engineering discipline where "fail x% of the time" is acceptable for x > 0.

And just in case anyone doesn't want to reread the previous lengthy exchange and is confused, this is not to say that there are no tolerances, no mistakes, that no bridge ever collapses.  What it says is that when it happens, we consider it a failure, and we investigate why it happened and we stop it happening again--in traffic engineering, it's part of the design, no need to fix anything.