Engineers should not design streets

I&#x27;d like to say that it&#x27;s not engineers that prioritise cars on the road.<p>It&#x27;s the society, which creates incentives and goals that are given ultimately to road planners.

A bit off topic (not related to street design in any way): to me the &quot;interface designed by engineers&quot; looks much better than the one made by UX designers. Ok, it doesn&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;UX&#x2F;applications design. People should stop thinking that users are stupid.

Streets and roads are designed before the houses around them go up.<p>They&#x27;re the <i>first</i> 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?<p>I think Jane Jacobs would have a thing or two to say about enshrining beauty alongside utility

Engineers should not &quot;decorate&quot; streets and buildings. That&#x27;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!