Book Review: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
I’m writing this review while wearing my brand new Strong Towns t-shirt. I only bring this up to acknowledge my own bias when coming to this latest text by my friend Chuck Marohn.
Chuck started the Strong Towns blog a decade and a half ago and has grown it into one of the most influential movements in the urban planning field. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, published in 2021, is the latest outgrowth of this advocacy.
Confessions is a bit of a followup to Chuck’s 2019 Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. In Strong Towns, Chuck lays out the entire Strong Towns approach to city building. It’s summed up in the idea that cities should observe residents’ needs and do what’s in their power immediately to meet those needs, then repeat. There is a lot more details in the 200+ page text and hundreds of blog posts that Chuck has written, but that’s the foundation of all of it.
While Strong Towns focuses on city building as a whole, Confessions focuses entirely on a city’s transportation network. Confessions starts with a powerful personal story about traffic violence that was caused by roadway design. From there, it builds the case that road design impacts driving behavior and how the engineering profession contributes to unsafe roads and unproductive places.
Along the way, Chuck provides a great primer on how a city’s transportation network can support or hinder the City’s ability to be a productive place. Unfortunately, there is not enough detail on this topic for residents to knowledgeably advocate for a better street network. Chuck does not talk about the different choices cities can make for their transportation network, and the tradeoffs between those different choices. While Confessions isn’t intended as a one-stop shop for transportation advocacy, it could provide additional information or pointers to resources beyond confessions.engineer for people to learn more about how cities can build better transit options. With Strong Towns coming out in early 2019, and Confessions coming out in late 2021, maybe Chuck is working on a more detailed followup exploring these issues to be released in late 2023 or early 2024.
While Chuck leaves out some of the explanations on how the transportation network interacts with other areas of city building, he includes some ideas that don’t seem to fit with the book as a whole. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the routine traffic stop. While this is certainly related to the transportation network and is a key issue for many communities, the way it was addressed in the book felt like a tangent or afterthought. Additionally, there is an entire chapter on transportation fads that already feels out of date less than two years after publication. While these sections were interesting, and some of them important topics, they didn’t help support the overall theme of the book.
The other area where Confessions fell short was in understanding how a city’s transportation network creates the basis for which all land uses are built upon. The book is very focused on transportation, but doesn’t make the connections between transportation and land use and livability within cities. Chapter 2, The Difference Between a Road and a Street, talks extensively about how lower speed streets support a productive place, and higher speed roads are best to connect productive places. However, there isn’t much discussion about the other aspects of building productive places.
This distinction between streets and roads is a key concept throughout all of Strong Towns. Streets provide for low speed travel through communities, while roads provide high speed connections between them. This distinction makes a lot of sense throughout much of North America where cities are distinct places separated by rural areas. It is much more difficult to apply this distinction within San Angeles (the mega city that spans from Ventura to San Diego). Throughout urban Southern California, there are no real community centers of productive activity that can serve as distinct nodes to connect with high speed roadways. Instead, there is a more or less uniform density and productive capacity throughout much of the southland. This makes it very difficult to apply the lessons identified in Confessions to city building in Southern California.
Overall, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer provides a great overview for understanding how our existing road designs are failing our communities and what cities could do to improve them. I was hoping that this would be a great first book for new city council members and planning commissioners to introduce them to the ideas related to building better cities. Unfortunately, Confessions is both too focused on transportation and not specific enough in application to be a good resource for city decision makers. But that wasn’t Chuck’s target audience for this book. His target audience was the general public who want to advocate for improvements in their own communities. For that audience, this book is almost perfect.