Engineering and Social Justice–The Empathetic Engineer

Can you believe this is on the webpage of a transportation engineering firm? 

I see many Franklins come into our program with the goal of social justice and making people’s lives better.  That gives me great hope for the future.  However I worry that the engineering opportunities out there today are not tuned to those exact same goals, and graduates may be forced to give up their idealism in search of a job.  I recently found a transportation engineering firm, Toole Design, that I was really impressed with.  This firm was started by an NCSU graduate, Jennifer Toole.  (It is perhaps significant that her degree was not in engineering, but in landscape architecture.). It is a fairly big firm, with 18 offices in the US and Canada.  It specializes in transportation solutions that emphasize walking and biking.  It used to be that the the field of transportation was ruled by the three Es–engineering, education, and enforcement. The history of transportation engineering over the last 75 years has been by and large about ramming through large highway projects that privilege the automobile at great cost to our social fabric.    Toole says that we need to transform that to three new E’s–Ethics, Equity, and Empathy.  We will be talking about transportation systems later in the class, but seeing Toole Design gives me hope that what we will be talking about is not some naive optimism, but something that can be put into practice to improve people’s lives.