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On June 25, Hoyt Architects hosted Wes Marshall, PhD, PE, a professor, transportation engineer and author as part of its 2025 Urban Studies Speaker Series. Marshall, who is a professor of civil engineering at University of Colorado Denver, recently wrote 2024’s Killed By a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System. Through his teaching, engineering and writing, Marshall looks to create safer transportation systems for a better, brighter future. Below is an excerpt from the full Q&A interview that will appear in the September issue of SRQ Magazine.

SRQ: Can you speak to the design flaws that have led to so many dangerous roads for pedestrians and the shift in thinking needed to create safer roadways?

Marshall: What we’re doing now is that we’re sort of sitting around playing whack-a-mole, waiting for people to get hurt, before we actually do something. We’re putting a band-aid on a bigger, fundamental problem. To really switch things up, we need to have a different mindset. When I was taught to design a street, you started from the center line out. You first figure out how much roadway you need to give to the cars—not just the cars today, but the amount of cars we think there are going to be 20 years down the line—then we tried to give them that much roadway and then I’d say, 'What do we need for public transit or bikes?' Whatever’s left ends up going to the pedestrian, which is like three feet on the side of the road.

We’re all saying that we want to prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists—if we want to put our money where our mouth is, then maybe we should start from the outside in. Give enough space to them, first and foremost. Make sure they’re safe and keep them away from fast, speeding cars. Then start working your way in and whatever’s left over can go to the cars. It’s a totally different mindset and nobody is doing it that way, but that’s the sort of big shift we would need to create the kinds of places that people would actually want to be in and not be in their cars.

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