I'm retiring from the engineering profession

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/5/23/im-retiring-from-the-engineering-profession

by ThatGeoGuy • 4 years ago

266 171 4 years ago

Outside of Ontario Canada, I'm glad "software engineer" is not a regulated title. Imagine having a contrarian opinion on design patterns and then getting your livelihood threatened.

light_hue_13• 4 years ago

It's not just Ontario. It's pretty much all of Canada. Everyone should be careful about this.

Quebec's equivalent of PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) is the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec). People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin. Microsoft fought the law in Quebec and lost.

Alberta, BC, and even New Brunswick have similar laws. Other provinces might too.

gruez• 4 years ago

People in Ontario and Quebec have gotten nasty letters threatening legal action even for saying they're software engineers on Linkedin.

Seriously? Are the engineering licensing organizations really scouring linkedin for people calling themselves "engineers, and sending threatening letters to anyone who's not on their list?

oceanplexian• 4 years ago

Governments are like Religions. Every one of them arrogantly thinks their way is the superior way to do things (Across all sides of the political spectrum), despite the existence of contradictory governments with perfectly functioning, and sometimes better functioning societies.

For some reason it seems like the Internet pisses governments off of all stripes, since a Global, free, meritocracy where everyone can compete on an equal playing field is like giving them the finger. And while governments can keep a tight leash on their own citizens with rules and regulations, they can’t make the rest of the world do whatever crazy nonsense they feel like. In this example, Canada will just be left behind in the 21st Century economy.

hlieberman• 4 years ago

Quebec also, as well as Texas for a couple of years.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

"Developer with an engineering degree" is a reasonable substitute for regimes.

throwaway7875442• 4 years ago

I'm of the opposite opinion. The industry is awash in newbies with senior titles being put on software projects where they are directly responsible for safety, privacy, health care, etc. Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure. In the next decade we will hear more about software bugs killing people, outing them, bankrupting them, overturning governments, hobbling armies, and then we'll have to reckon with why regulated titles exist.

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

No one can agree on what should actually be part of the regulation though. It would end up becoming a box checking exercise like security is where complying with requirements and actually being secure are unrelated.

Can you imagine if governments regulated something like if your code touches important data, it must either be written in a verified safe language like Rust? How would people feel about that?

Regular engineering is a lot easier to regulate because there are a lot of agreeable rules like “fire escape stairs need to be x cm wide with a step depth of z cm. And there is no situational context that needs to be taken in to account.

While all programming best practices are vague helpers that should be discarded as soon as they aren’t helping.

kabdib2• 4 years ago

I can guarantee you that "We have to add a bureaucracy to fix all of this" won't actually fix anything.

I've seen proposals for regulating software engineers. They've all been transparent and embarrassing land-grabs. One (thankfully) failed effort in California was basically a series of electrical engineering requirements with a little bit of firmware focus, and some idiotic-even-at-the-time development methodology; absolutely useless for the stated purpose.

light_hue_13• 4 years ago

The problem is that the current regulations around the PEng (Canada) and the PE (US) are nonsense when it comes to software. They don't lead to more accountability. They don't lead to better software. Getting a PEng or a PE is a liability, you're wasting your time as a student instead of learning something useful.

To get a PEng or PE you have to take courses in, and pass an exam that covers, topics like power systems. This is a good idea for say a civil or mechanical engineer, since whatever they design will physically interface with all sorts of systems. They need that breadth otherwise accidents will happen.

But software engineering is different. The problems with crappy software that lead to deaths, unfairness, etc. have nothing to do with software engineers not understanding power systems. Having people pass such exams contributes nothing to safety.

Licensing organizations refuse to change. So they're simply not relevant to software. And as software grows, they're losing their grip on what is already the leading engineering discipline by far. There are more CS graduates (65k) every year than electrical (17k), chemical (8k), mechanical (20k), and civil engineers (15k) combined. Soon there will be more CS grads every year (65k) than all engineers combined (83k).

kortilla2• 4 years ago

Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure.

Where do you see this happening?

99.99% of software engineers don’t touch safety critical code. There is no reason to regulate them. It’s much better to regulate the safety critical products.

BeetleB• 4 years ago

Right now when software kills people, they chock it up to a system or hardware failure.

This is sensationalism. Systems involving safety usually have an associated ISO standard. If it's not being followed, there's more at fault than just the SW engineer.

In many (all?) states, designing and building something that has safety implications requires a PE license by law - it doesn't matter if it's mostly a SW product or not. The individual engineers don't need the license, but someone in the chain does, and he/she is required to review the work, and it is his/her ass on the line if something goes wrong.

VerminOctopus1• 4 years ago

Is software engineer a regulated title in Ontario? I’m working here, as a software engineer (remotely mind you), and have no special credential…

wheelinsupial• 4 years ago

I think so... but I'm neither a lawyer nor an engineer...

"PEO considers non-licensed use of “Software Engineer” to be a violation of our Act."

https://www.peo.on.ca/public-protection/complaints-and-illeg...

pdonis4• 4 years ago

From the article:

"Claims that the title “Professional Engineer” and the initials “PE” are a trade name, the very use of which constitutes commercial speech in any circumstance, is inconsistent with how I understand my vocation. I suspect most of my fellow licensees similarly consider themselves public servants, not commercial entities whose competitive privilege is protected by a state cartel."

While I understand his complaint here, I'm afraid his implicit factual claim is false: any profession that depends on the government to license its members is in fact a "commercial entity whose competitive privilege is protected by a state cartel". If Professional Engineers really want to be "public servants", the best way for them to do that, ironically, is to have their own private licensing body that applies its own independent, objective standards and cannot be used by governments as political tools.

infogulch5• 4 years ago

You're missing the forest for a piece of bark on a tree. His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests, and practitioners should do more than just validate that projects meet the required specifications according to accepted standards, but that the industry -- from individuals to institutions -- should also operate with an ethical and moral imperative to learn and improve and grow the discipline at the current edge of its domain of competence. If "accepted standards" are shown to be wrong then it's not good enough to continue using them, as if the legal indemnification provided by standing behind an "accepted standard" is the only thing that matters.

tbrownaw7• 4 years ago

Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Asbestos turns out to cause cancer, and suddenly it's no longer an allowed building material. Or whatever.

pdonis4• 4 years ago

His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests

And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.

tbrownaw7• 4 years ago

Why not both? Just because you have special legal status to have the government recognize you as authoritative on certain specific topics, doesn't have to mean you can't also identify as a public servant and do activities or advocacy you think will help the public.

pdonis4• 4 years ago

Why not both?

This article illustrates why not. The author is a professional engineer, but he can't depend on the body that licenses him--the government of Minnesota--to judge him by objective professional standards as he advocates for better engineering practices, because it's a government and therefore a fundamentally political organization, not a professional one.

halffaday2• 4 years ago

My feelings are mixed. The licensing processing is pretty lenient, and NCEES testing just weeds out the bottom 1/3 of applicants. Keeping a license is basically a matter of paying your dues. Sure, people get disciplined by the board, but it’s almost always for forgetting their PDH credits, which are “listen to this vendor-sponsored webinar during lunch and you’ll get an hour”. Practicing outside one’s competence is very common, and almost nobody gets in trouble for that, unless there is legal trouble.

That said, licensing does create an artificial scarcity and a completely superfluous cottage industry of land-development hacks, typically one-man-show practices, that specialize in being a land owner or speculator’s pseudo-attorney for a permit application process. The construction plans for permit are basically conceptual, rife with flagrant errors, and may have little relevance to actual construction, since a contractor probably won’t use the plans anyway. In my region, maybe 30-60% of the market is like this, with the exceptions being larger commercial projects, like apartments or medical offices. A parking-lot extension for a quadplex, though? That’s going to be a PE who will perjure himself all day to a Planning Commission for $500. They’re just a licensed as the engineer scrutinizing seismic forces on bridge piles.

So is the free market the answer? I don’t know. The land owners are the ones choosing the hucksters. They’re also usually fast-dealers that aren’t concerned with product quality once it’s sold. I don’t think “develop as thou wilt” is a good policy because that used to be how it was done, and it killed enough people to create a demand for government intervention.

The problem is, like software, nobody has any idea how to measure “goodness” of civil engineering, and laymen have no idea of the quality of product they’re getting unless it fails catastrophically.

I just accept that it’s not perfect, the hacks aren’t going anywhere, and I try not to do shitty work.

roenxi2• 4 years ago

I think this situation is unpleasant and there are losers with no winners. That being said, I can see the perspective of the licensing board.

Presumably the point of the PE title is a reliable stamp that means "this person is a solid, educated, experienced and politically neutral individual who will keep your buildings standing". It isn't appropriate for engineers to weigh in on political questions about how people should live their lives in their professional capacity.

This is a lesson I suspect the software semi-engineering profession will learn when the cost of the political battles Silicon Valley is engaged in start to come due. Much like in religious contexts "be good" somehow morphs into "spill blood" when people try to control what others can and cannot do. Engineers should not go anywhere close to even the outskirts of that fight. Whoever wins it deserves a functioning, well engineered society.

Strong Towns is cool with me, but it is a political project trying to do good. That sits in tension with professional engineering. Engineers do good, but not with activism.

stefan_• 4 years ago

The world sure would be easy if we could just label what street designers do as "engineering work beyond redoubt" and every opposition as "[political] activism". But of course it isn't. It is long known that making oversized streets encourages speeding. Yet they keep designing them oversized. It is well researched that "sharrows" do nothing. Yet they keep painting them. Their work is not that of engineers, it's work from guidelines that are of course the result of politics first and foremost.

goodluckchuck• 4 years ago

Politics is war, and everything is politics.

drjasonharrison• 4 years ago

I have to disagree. Professional certification, degrees, etc are not the same as licensing and responsibility for reviewing and approving a specific project. In most jurisdictions I can use the title of Doctor and it is easily determined that I am not a medical doctor but have a PhD in Computer Science.

The abuse that professional engineers have received for various freedom of speech actions are chilling and disgusting. When some one earns the title of PE they don't lose their rights to have and publicly express opinions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/04/28/...

Sometimes the only way to get things fixed is through political activism. And some times the things that need fixing overlap with decisions and solutions that engineers implement. Leaded gas wasn't just invented, produced, distributed, legalized, transported, sold, burned, by one person.

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

That’s just not how the world works in any sense. Regulations themselves are political, and professional engineers are the ones you want pushing for development of regulations, not career politicians!

Otherwise we wouldn’t have things like aviation safety regulations etc.

throwaway20374• 4 years ago

"[P]olitically neutral individual" -- I'm confused by this part. Can a vocally left-leaning professional engineer still do a good job when the client is vocally right-leaning? I expect so. And vice versa. I see no conflict of interest.

Deeper: What does that term even mean? It is so vague and snarky, I am struggling to understand your purpose. What kind of person (in _any_ democratic country) is highly educated but politically neutral? None that I know. To be clear: I do not consider "centrist" and "neutral" the same.

Another thing: Lots of medical doctors had strong (political) views against smoking tobacco before it was so popular to rail again Big Tobacco. Should we muzzle them also?

Last one: All highly-developed countries have very strict rules about who can practice law. Many of these lawyers lead the effort to fight discriminatory laws and rulings against minorities/less-priveleged in their respective countries. Again: Should we also restrict this profession to only "politically neutral individuals"?

roenxi2• 4 years ago

Can a vocally left-leaning professional engineer still do a good job when the client is vocally right-leaning?

Yeah, exactly. They have to be professionally neutral.

Should we muzzle them also?

He'd not being muzzled. As he points out in the linked article, he "ha[s] not practised engineering for more than a decade". That is probably a factor in the boards decision - he is clearly using an official title that is supposed to be politically neutral in political activism. This is clear because he is not doing engineering.

I personally agree with his activism, but it is out of line with what engineering strives for as a discipline.

Should we also restrict this profession to only "politically neutral individuals"?

There is no need for politically neutral lawyers. Law isn't a matter of dealing with an objective reality in the same way engineering or medicine are. Although they do use logic, law isn't a technical field.

And I do think that license restrictions on who can be a lawyer are deeply questionable, although as time passes I do better understand the perspective for for forcing people who want to be judges to engage with traditional culture.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

Granted I only clicked through to three links, but I can’t find what this person actually stands for or what their opponents object to. It’s just conflict without content as far as I can find. Why should I care about this? There’s a cause but I don’t understand what it is.

klodolph• 4 years ago

The author's engineering license lapsed in 2018, in 2020 he realized it had lapsed, so he renewed it and paid a late fee.

He's being asked to pay a fine, take an ethics course, and admit to dishonesty--because during the period when the license was lapsed, he still put "professional engineer" after his name.

It sounds like this is happening because some people are mad at him, and not because this is a serious violation that a licensing board would ordinarily punish.

tbrownaw7• 4 years ago

We are hearing only one side of things here.

I could just as easily read that as someone who no longer practices using their license to give weight to their activism, and then it turns out they didn't even bother to actually keep up that license that they were using to get people to listen to them.

If guess it probably mostly depends on if your think the lapsed license is a legitimate accident or a sign of indifference. Assuming the board is in fact usually forgiving on lapses as is suggested here.

tbrownaw7• 4 years ago

Well there is an "about" page, linked from the header in desktop or hidden in the "+" menu on mobile.

Their articles have shown up here a fair few times, which I assume is part of what makes it interesting.

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea. Basically they’re advocating for building towns and cities that aren’t car-centric. Talking about overhauling planning standards to stop single-dwelling only suburbs that are only accessible by car, proper transit planning, not just enlarging freeways and then finding induced demand makes them even slower over time, etc.

gumby2• 4 years ago

They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea.

Or you could just click on the blog header and read its “about” statement, which would only take a couple of minutes.

wolverine8768• 4 years ago

It appears they claim there was aggressive suppression of free speech, on important policy matters, by a professional licensing board?

halffaday2• 4 years ago

Chuck Marohn is an ideas-guy that pivoted his career from engineer to paid speaker. It’s a lot of TED-talks kind of stuff that resonates with certain donors, and it includes a lot of “guys, you’re doing it wrong!” statements and trashing trade organizations. Those trade organizations have pushed the licensure board to strip Marohn’s license for years, and I think he’s finally had enough of the legal trouble.

zucker42• 4 years ago

Strong Towns criticizes U.S. street design and development practices. Mainly they argue that many of the design practices pushed in manuals and by the engineering profession are dangerous and lead to worse cities (especially because they give too much deference to cars). They'd want things like ending minimum parking requirements, redesigning intersections and roads to make them more safe for pedestrians and cyclists, bringing back older style main streets, etc.

Because Mr. Marohn criticizes standard road engineering practices he has evidently developed enemies within the engineering profession. Some of these enemies are retaliating by initiating lawsuits for calling himself an engineer during a period where he had inadvertantly let his license lapse.

reagle• 4 years ago

Read his excellent book Confessions. Because he criticizes unethical/corrupt engineering practices his enemies say he is bringing ill repute upon the profession and violating the terms of his license.

buzzy_hacker• 4 years ago

For those new to Strong Towns, I feel this article is most representative of what they’re about: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

labrador3• 4 years ago

I'm skeptical that things are as bad as this article states.

forum_ghost6• 4 years ago

The idea is that we just don't have enough productivity to sustain slightly longer roads, and live in the same houses we used to have on farms in 1920s is insulting to reader's intelligence.

This is just another piece of luddite alarmism.

Always Remember: the situation is SO DIRE, we had to exempt private jets from the fuel tax. Even billionaires simply can't afford to pay gas taxes, this is how bad things are /s: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/private-j...

Meanwhile the city of Austin debt service is 5% of its budget, and Austin's debt per capita is $1,287.

Some Ponzi.

xyzzyz4• 4 years ago

Strongtowns is literal misinformation. The story about infrastructure costs killing municipalities is entirely false, and can be seen as such with only bare minimum of research. Infrastructure costs are typically around 10% of the budget of municipalities, and almost universally are under 20%. Look up your own city or town, and report back if you find otherwise.

skybrian• 4 years ago

It seems overbroad in that some cities are doing fine, while in other, less trendy places, there actually are dying towns that these arguments could very well apply to.

rurban• 4 years ago

As ex-urban planner in Europe and having lived in Houston, academic and professional knowledge of this wrong development in the US is widely known. He is just citing popular knowledge of the failed "American dream", suburban development for cars, not families.

Most of Europe has held a strong opposition to this development, and did fine.

throw0101a8• 4 years ago

Strong Towns has plenty of case studies of different places, to varying degrees, losing quite a bit of money on maintenance:

- Spokane: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/24/dispatches-fr...

- Kanas City: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/5/kansas-citys-fa...

- Cobb County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-add...

- Collin County: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...

- Baxter: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/18/the-classic-ca...

And then add to that the costs of climate change for car-centric development. And health effect costs of car-centric development.

throw0101a8• 4 years ago

Plenty of academic research/literature on this, as well as book:

Chuck is not the first to point out the financial inefficiencies associated with sprawl. Robert Burchell of Rutgers[1] has led several important studies showing the substantially increased municipal costs associated with sprawl development; my then-colleague Matt Raimi devoted a well-researched chapter to it in our 1999 book Once There Were Greenfields.[2] At NRDC, we undertook a small empirical study[3] in Cleveland and Chicago that confirmed the additional operating and maintenance costs associated with suburban wastewater infrastructure when compared with that in the cities.

* https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Strong Towns is only reporting what the literature is saying. You're free to be skeptical, but that's what they've concluded from the empirical evidence. The claim is falsifiable if you want to get into testing it.

jordanpg• 4 years ago

I read the article, and still don't see what is being proposed.

we need to intentionally return to our traditional pattern of development, one based on creating neighborhoods of value, scaled to actual people. When we do this, we will inevitably rediscover our traditional values of prudence and thrift as well as the value of community and place.

So, less suburbs and more what?

ryukafalz2• 4 years ago

Walkable cities and walkable small towns.

hispanic• 4 years ago

So, less suburbs and more what? Sprawling, automobile-centric development enforced by exclusionary zoning has been the prevailing land-use model in the US and Canada for so long (starting soon after the close of WWII) that few people alive today know anything different.

Streetcar suburbs (even with the streetcars now long gone) are a model of development that Strong Towns endorses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/27/in-praise-of-s...

mattcwilson2• 4 years ago

You may also appreciate: https://devonzuegel.com/post/we-should-be-building-cities-fo...

midislack• 4 years ago

I just "say" I'm an engineer like all the coders here. I don't hold a certification nor do I have an engineering degree. But I sure enjoy saying I'm an engineer. Like many of you fellow coders I'm getting close to claiming I'm a doctor too. Just call me Dr. Code. I have a license to precribe additional billable hours.

pstuart• 4 years ago

I'm a data plumber -- bits go through pipes and into buckets.

throwamon• 4 years ago

I'm a garbage collector, at least when coding in C.

Gigachad4• 4 years ago

Work gave us all tshirts that say “company name - Engineering”. I do enjoy walking around with it and people assuming I do something more interesting than working on ad tech.

Hamuko2• 4 years ago

I just "say" I'm an engineer like all the coders here.

I work as a coder and actually have a bachelor's degree in information and communication technologies, so I've never really had any qualms about calling myself a software engineer.

personaenon• 4 years ago

You should, you DO NOT have an engineering degree....

randomdata• 4 years ago

Seems reasonable. Physicians, without PhDs, usurped doctor from academics back in the day in an attempt to bring legitimacy to their profession, so why not coders as well?

User232• 4 years ago

Yep, doctor just means teacher. A physician should be called medicus if they want a fancy Latin title.

paledot• 4 years ago

That's blanket illegal here in Quebec. You can't call yourself an engineer of any kind unless you're licensed by a professional board. I'm a software developer.

2b3a51• 4 years ago

UK around 9:24 BST the link (and the strongtowns.org domain) is giving a certificate error. I've tried several different Internet connections (I'm on the mobile network and there can be issues sometimes) including links from my shell account on a shared server.

One device says "No OCSP Response" and the mobile broadband connection thinks the site contains adult content. Links just says 'ssl error'. So I archived the page so as to be able to read it...

https://archive.ph/hAKsX

Back on topic: I've heard of 'code of conduct' type cases being used in the days of the General Teaching Council in HR type disputes, not routine but apparently local union professionals had a case load. The GTC was abolished in 2010, and the teaching unions had a role in that.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

I suppose he must call himself "Pirate Engineer" now.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

Texas may have a lot of f'd things about their laws, but one thing that they do very well is their "sunset commission". I think it's every 12 years or so, every department/licensure organization comes up for review, and they basically need to re-explain why they should exist. The idea is to prevent these organizations that turn into little fiefdoms to protect their own power.

A couple years ago the state veterinary board sued an Austin animal shelter leader and no-kill advocate and tried to have her license revoked. The sunset commission reamed them a new one, pointing out the absurdity of them going after a nonprofit leader while they had a major problem with vet drug abuse that they weren't handling. IIRC the majority of the vet board ended up resigning.

Yoofie• 4 years ago

The sunset commission is a great idea. Similar to what you mentioned, we really need "garbage collection" for for laws, regulation, boards, departments, etc. A periodic review and cleanup of legal and organizational garbage.

burlesona• 4 years ago

Hi HN,

I’m the board chair at Strong Towns[1]. I normally lay low on these topics but I'm seeing some incorrect info among the top comments, so I wanted to respond to a few things.

- - - - -

1. What is this all about?

Chuck is a licensed PE in Minnesota, and has maintained his license for years even though he was working in advocacy, not practicing engineering.

There's busy work to keep a license active. Chuck accidentally missed filing a renewal form and paying a fee in 2018, but continued all other requirements, such as taking required CE classes.

This is actually so common that there's a simple procedure for late filing with the state. Chuck filed and paid his late fees, and the state renewed his license with no comment.

About six weeks _after_ renewing his license, the state filed a complaint against Chuck accusing him of committing fraud because his bio on our website said he was a "professional engineer" during a window of time when his renewal was late.

There's no precedent for this. There are many PE's actually practicing engineering and signing documents with overdue renewal forms every year. They file late and get renewed with no issue.

During negotiations with the state, their comments made it clear the licensing board is seeking to use their power to discredit and silence Chuck's advocacy, hence the ongoing lawsuit to defend Chuck's right to free speech.

(Longer version here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/23/lawsuit)

The linked article explains why Chuck is now choosing to move his license to "retired" status in 2022 rather than renew it again.

- - - - -

2. What is Strong Towns all about?

I've seen several comments here suggesting we're some kind of anti-car environmental thing, which is not correct.

Strong Towns is principally focused on municipal fiscal and economic health. We work with cities and towns that are struggling to keep the lights on and provide basic, functional services, and try to help them (a) understand how they got into the mess they're in, and (b) get out of it.

This connects with cars because the status quo in the US is as follows: typically the federal and state governments offer lots of funding for new roadways and roadway expansion for economic development purposes, but don't cover maintenance.

Many cities have much more infrastructure to maintain than their tax base can support, and also weak growth, so expansion is a bad idea. Nevertheless, cities usually seek and receive expansion road expansions because, culturally, we expect building more roads to make us more wealthy, and don't really question whether we're over-building or whether new / expanded roads will pay off.

Thus we advocate ending highway expansion (in most cases), and advocate better utilizing our existing infrastructure.

We are pro-walkability because walkable places are infrastructure efficient, therefore cost-effective and wealth-creating, which correlates with the outcomes we care about.

We also care a lot about transparency in municipal accounting, safe streets, housing, and removing unnecessary regulation (in particular parking mandates and certain kinds of zoning).

- - - - -

It's Sunday and I'm headed out with my family, but I'll check in on this a bit and try to answer questions if you all have any.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/board

FollowingTheDao• 4 years ago

Good for Charles Marohn!

You will see who is on your side when things fall apart. Suburbans sprawl has weakened towns, as has the Richard Florida mindset of attracting specific people to create an unsustainable economy.

I'm retiring from the engineering profession

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