4.25 ( )

This book felt somehow more focused than his previous book, "Strongtowns", and also a bit more scatterbrained.

I think the parts of the book that were focused on how engineering design standards value speed and throughput of traffic, over safety, wealth creation, and return on investment were really good. I thought this was what the whole book was going to be about.

Other parts, I'm not so sure about. I think much of the book was spent either re-explaining ideas that were in "Strongtowns" or were creating an assumption that you have read it. I think there was a bit too much overlap, and felt pretty redundant at times.

Some of the topics had way too much time spent on them as well, such as the section on policing. I actually agree with many of his takeaways on policing reform, however it felt a little hamfisted and I'm not sure this was the right medium to tackle the topic. What does policing have to do with engineering? Isn't this book supposed to be about how he's had to shift his paradigm from "engineer thinking" to "Strongtowns thinking?"

I also have some troubles with his logic sometimes. Sometimes I think governments need to spend on providing public services to people, even if it "loses money". I understand his premise is that unless municipalities start focusing on revenue positive projects, cities will become insolvent. However with things like mass transit, sometimes you need to keep investing in it, in order to create a system that encourages ridership. Other times I think he used some examples that were really unconvincing to prove his point that something is a waste of money, and something that people don't value.

Overall, I definitely still enjoyed the book, and will definitely read anything more he decides to write. ( )

Interesting book by someone who doesn’t believe in Big Highway or Big Transit. His main argument is that we’ve killed a lot of people by developing stroads—things that are neither roads, which are wide and optimized for cars and have few entrances and exits and no way for people to cross on foot, nor streets, which are narrow and clearly signal by their design that drivers need to go slow and that people will be crossing on foot. Because of midcentury design standards, we instead have roads/stroads marked at 30 mph that are designed for 50 or 60, and drivers naturally go that fast, but people are crossing and drivers are entering/making lefts across traffic too, with tragic results. I’m not really sure this is a reasonable diagnosis—I don’t really see where you should put a school in this framework—but it’s provocative and I appreciated his focus on helping people by starting with the smallest thing you can do from them and going from there, and not assuming that transit is a solution to poverty. You get healthy communities, he argues, by building places that people want to be—not parking lots or roads. ( )