My provocative proposal: Want a roadway safety movement? Ditch the engineers.

We have a roadway safety problem in the United States. In 2024, we lost 39,345 people on our nation’s streets. While we have seen improvements in roadway fatality numbers since then, we are still far from the acceptable number of roadway fatalities: zero.

It is well-documented that legacy transportation engineering decisions have contributed to our fundamentally unsafe streets. The fundamentals of transportation engineering have historically prioritized the movement of the largest volume of cars through a street as quickly as possible. This has resulted in many roads that prioritize speed over safety and created an ideology in the engineering profession that transportation engineering decisions should be optimized for people driving cars — making our streets unsafe for everyone, both in and outside of the car. 

Over the years, there has been a move toward rethinking safety on our roads, which has aligned planners, public health practitioners, first responders, policy analysts, and engineers towards the common goal of zero. The expansion of thought leaders in the roadway safety space has led the way to movement-making professionals, who have different skills than engineers and are skilled in public health, planning, policy, and more. The rise of the prevalence of these professionals builds on safety as something defined solely through an engineering-focused design, and expands the definition to the implementation of behavioral interventions, systems thinking, long-range planning, community engagement and more.

The adoption of the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program acknowledges that policy and process change is essential. The implementation of the Safe System Approach argues that defining post-crash care and changing behavior to reinforce that responsibility is shared are essential to creating a safer system. To achieve system safety, we need more than engineers who can create good plan sets. We need multidisciplinary, movement-making professionals, too.

This is why I have a provocative proposal: If we want a successful roadway safety movement, it’s time to focus less on hiring engineers, and focus more on hiring movement-making professionals.

Hear me out

For the most part, transportation engineering as a profession has evolved to correct legacy decisions that impact safety and seeks to make safer future decisions. Engineering jobs, in many instances, are prioritized at the forefront of the roadway safety movement due to the power of a Professional Engineer (PE) license. 

The PE license is an acknowledgment that an engineer can affect the public’s health, safety, welfare, and public trust; shows that you have the competency to review and approve construction plans; and gives the legal backing to sign and seal them. Having a PE proves that an engineer has the fundamental skillset needed to build, maintain, and redesign roadways. 

The PE license is exclusive and can only be granted to people who have a four-year degree from an accredited engineering program and who have at least four years of engineering experience. Because of this, and because of the importance of plan-signing for construction projects, PE certification is a common job requirement for those employed in the roadway safety movement. However PE certification, despite being required, is often not necessary — and due to the restrictive nature of the license being available to only engineers, it pushes out movement-making professionals from being able to qualify for certain safety jobs.

For one month in 2025, I tracked the total number of jobs in the roadway safety movement and the skill sets they required. I searched for jobs on LinkedIn that included the word “safety” in their title and referenced Vision Zero, roadway safety, or traffic safety in the description. Through this search, over 60 percent of the posted jobs I found required an engineering background, and over 77 percent of those engineering jobs required an active PE license. However, based on the job descriptions for many of these jobs, a PE certification should not have been required for all but two of them, as the job descriptions and responsibilities did not include the active signing and sealing of construction plans. Many of the jobs that required the PE revolved around grant management, policy change, or process improvement, skills that movement-making professionals in the roadway safety space also have.

So why do we still require the PE for non-engineering jobs? There are likely many reasons for this. For example, engineering consultants with a PE credential could be paid more than their colleagues for work. Local or state governments may only be able to hire from a specific engineering hiring pocket that has standard job requirements agreed upon by the government, like the PE.

Long live the plangineer!

Roadway safety as a movement is stuck on the PE, but transportation as an industry has evolved to include more than engineers, and to teach non-engineers how to do engineering tasks. While planners cannot qualify for the PE exam because they do not have an engineering degree, many planners can support the planning, design, delivery, operation, and maintenance of our transportation systems without the bias toward speed and traffic volumes taught in engineering school. 

Known as “plangineers,” these urban planners combine their planning skills with engineering and project management expertise that is learned on the job. While plangineer may not be a job title for your organization to hire or bill, it is a reminder that engineering skills can be taught and that all the practitioners who speak the language of roadway safety in the built environment can adapt their knowledge to meet engineering needs.

Outside of the plangineer, our public health, policy, data analysis, and community engagement-focused counterparts who also care about roadway safety deserve jobs and a space in the field as well. Our interdisciplinary colleagues, who have essential skills that complement and define the roadway safety movement, also deserve jobs that are not limited by the PE license.

To build the roadway safety movement, we need to fundamentally rethink how we build capacity and develop and strengthen the skills, knowledge, and processes of our organizations. This requires, in many instances, challenging the PE requirement. Have a position that is mainly process improvement? Or strategic planning or policy development? Or data analysis, program evaluation, or reporting? Consider removing the engineering and PE requirements that come with those positions, and see the opportunities for movement-building continue to grow for your organization.

Getting to zero deaths on our roadways requires interdisciplinary skills that can challenge, change, and shape our transportation system. As your organization continues to hire people who influence roadway safety, rethink hiring only a PE. Or, even better: hire a PE and an interdisciplinary counterpart.