Who, exactly is designing America's notriously deadly road network — and how on earth do they keep getting away with it? On today's episode of The Brake, we're talking to traffic engineer, academic and now author, Wes Marshall, whose new book — "Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System" — unpacks the mountain of wildly outdated, severely limited, and often downright non-existent research that underlies so much of our national road design manuals. More importantly, though, Marshall's book also unpacks the more fundamental reasons why engineers keep widening lanes and saying no to crosswalks, even when the manuals give them permission to do something better — which, more often than not, they do.

Listen in, and read an excerpt from "Killed by a Traffic Engineer" here.