The truth is, everyone who participates in building these places is complicit. Everyone. The planners who approved the land use. The engineers who designed the road geometry. The developers who built apartments near retail without safe connections. The retailers who designed parking-lot entrances instead of pedestrian routes. The public officials who sign off on all of it.

…

I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at this corridor. It is familiar in all the wrong ways. My diagnosis is that this is not a fixable situation, not in any meaningful sense. You can’t slap in a crosswalk, a flashing beacon, or a strip of sidewalk and call it safe. The entire nature of the road — its speed, its function, its relationship to surrounding land uses — is incompatible with the safe movement of people. That’s unsafe for those both inside and especially outside a motor vehicle.

And yet, we build more places just like this every day. Everyone knows better, but we do it anyway. When we do, we make an unspoken agreement: some number of people will die here every year. Some number of people will be sacrificed for the sake of a built environment that few professionals really believe is worthy of their energy, expertise, or even their attention.

We don’t say that part out loud because, if we did, it would force us to confront the morality of our choices. These choices are deeply immoral.

This is part of why I’m no longer a practicing traffic engineer (and in fact, didn’t last very long in the profession at all): you don’t have the power to insist on building differently until you’re a fully-licensed PE, and you can’t become a fully-licensed PE until you’ve done what you’re told long enough to be indoctrinated into accepting the immoral status quo. It’s like the “blood in” requirement of street gang initiation: you don’t get to be a full-fledged member of the traffic engineering profession until you’ve designed infrastructure that will kill someone.