Engineers should not design streets | Hacker News Reader

Engineers should not design streets

andrewalexanderprice.com

7 pointsoftenwrong12 comments

I'd like to say that it's not engineers that prioritise cars on the road.

It's the society, which creates incentives and goals that are given ultimately to road planners.

Yeah this.

A bit off topic (not related to street design in any way): to me the "interface designed by engineers" looks much better than the one made by UX designers. Ok, it doesn't actually _look_ better from a purely aesthetical point of view, but you can basically do everything with it, whereas the other one uses a huge amount of space on the screen, probably uses 4x more energy for rendering, and the amount of possible interaction is very low.

While the engineer-designed UI looks complex and might make users afraid (at least at a first glance), it empowers them to do what they want. The second one has someone else taking most decisions (whence almost no options), which is a scary trend in current UI/UX/applications design. People should stop thinking that users are stupid.

High information density is not a priority for most interfaces.

While I also don’t particularly like the second example in this article, separating controls across panes, using more screen real estate, and adding hierarchy to presentation are all good things; and don’t imply the user is dumb. I like things I can intuit - who doesn’t?

Streets and roads are designed before the houses around them go up.

They're the first mistakes a city makes, and influence the errors everyone else makes to end up with the fugly city block we have now.

I can’t find a unifying theme in the photos the author likes. They’re quaint, perhaps?

I think Jane Jacobs would have a thing or two to say about enshrining beauty alongside utility

I struggle to find essence in that article as well. Text seem to suggest it's a 1/0 thing, good and bad design, but pictures don't seem to confirm that. A lot of them that are described as good I would hate. Horribly uneven sidewalks, uneven and slippery paving stones, horrible kerbs with no flattening for easy access, too narrow and very badly maintained sidewalks.

A lot of the examples are bad for me. I struggle to find pleasant ones. The ones that are designed nicely and look good are a wheelchair, baby stroller and old people nightmare.

Engineers should not "decorate" streets and buildings. That's what he wanted to say, perhaps.

There were no negative examples of streets in this article. Both examples of user interface design were negative.

Civil engineers are engineers in the sense of a regulated profession with design and safety standards and direct personal liability in many countries. While some engineers are software developers, not all software developers are engineers in this sense!

Maybe the kind that builds bridges but the ones that "engineer" streets are a clown profession that copies the same patterns over and over again, none of which have been devised under anything that could be deemed an evidence-based process.

I knew someone who did that. He worked mostly on improving safety and throughput. And took an evidence-based approach. I'm pretty sure that's the standard way to deal with things. It seemed awfully regulated.

The problems people seem to have are in design goals. And possibly incentives, once the goals are obvious.

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