That is not law and can change any time, so comparing it to a license was probably misleading. However, there are about 4,000 PTOEs in the US, so I do think that works against your claim that America’s transportation professionals are mostly just generic civils.

Regarding PTOEs, I said it is basically a license because in my area it is often written into contracts that consultants must have one on staff to perform XYZ traffic engineering task, usually operations-oriented.

So if we’re talking roadway design, it makes sense that PTOEs are not involved.

practice and continue our education in specialties. Even outside of transportation, it’s extremely uncommon where I live for working civil engineers to refer to themselves as a civil instead of by subdiscipline.

Most road engineers take either the roadway or traffic path early on. Everyone I know picked one or the other immediately after undergrad or even before. So it feels strange when I see arguments that American road engineers are under-specialized. It’s true about the education, but after that we…

Road engineering (usually highway engineering in the US) is the planning, design, and operation of roads. But the profession now is generally split into roadway engineering (pavement, curb, subgrade) and traffic engineering (analysis of traffic ops; design of signs, signals, markings).

Alright, you’re just not really engaging here.

Yes. Are you arguing that our roads are unsafe because all the road engineers took their licensure exams in structures and geotech?

I believe Marco uses the term road engineering to include what we would call traffic engineering as well as roadway engineering. Although the line between traffic analyst and transportation planner gets pretty blurry.

Uh, yeah? Traffic and roadway engineers take a transportation PE exam. You have to choose a specialty. That book is refers to the FE which only makes one an “engineer-in-training”. Very bad info here. Just google!

For traffic engineers, the PTOE is basically a license at this point.

Bluesky would be 40x better it disallowed any transportation or urbanism posts by users who have not read and passed a comprehension test of the book below

Corny ass “real eyes realize real lies” slab

Not really. It’s an ambiguous and magical term for something easily explained by principles that engineers understand just fine. It’s like talking about heart chakras to a cardiologists.

They’re not, and they shouldn’t, because it’s an ambiguous and magical term for something that is easily explained by economics, which engineers tend to grasp much better than planners and journalists.

Signals can definitely be a copout when you don’t want to manage the BS going on at the curb (NYC’s parking, loading in sight triangles).

Daylighting becomes truly essential if you want a driver to turn while yielding to a car on one side and a walker on the other. Just way too busy otherwise.

Roundabouts aren’t easy to build in NYC

In the mind of many urbanists, the one-way street is tainted by its history, and restriction of movements or flows is a tool that traffic engineers simply cannot be trusted with. Something called a “half signal” is supposed to be the best we can do.

Didn’t completely fall off post war. Continued into the 1970s. These days, urbanists with weak imaginations are pushing hard to revert everything wider than 20’ to two-way.

Traffic ops research is packed to the brim with this kind of stuff in the age of “Big Data”. Just need to mix in some cellphone tracking, some “V2X”, and some ML or RL.

Plenty of people have been paying a premium for it! It’s not a hypothetical.

Why would they do that? They sell cars.

It is not a hypothetical. They are operating in other cities, and they were operating in NYC until the permit was cancelled, and many people have been happy to pay.

By the government? Or by Waymo?

The article says they just completed 8 months in Manhattan without a collision.

What money? Was NY paying Waymo as part of this?

It’s pretty obvious that they solve the problem of “private vehicle travel without having to drive or have a random guy drive you”.

And every young doc I interact with says something to the effect of “you don’t go into medicine for the money anymore” lmao. Not being worth a million until your late 30s, insane job security, oh the horror

Basically the urban version of the New Jersey jughandle.

Yes, as long as signals are properly coordinated. And I thought it was usually closer to 1000’.

Worth watching live but really need microsim to evaluate alternative intersections vs conventional. Here is the FHWA guide.

rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/294...

My point being mainly about the drawbacks of having so many phases and all that lost green time.

Great way of putting it. RTOR is supposed to be off in all my Synchro work because the capacity benefits are considered negligible.

My closest calls as a ped are all permissive lefts. IMO this is where it gets interesting. Protected lefts, ped phases, LPIs - gotta start eliminating movements