The Conservative Approach to Traffic Engineering

There's this idea which is you know it's kind of understandable on its face but in traffic engineering you use a conservative quote unquote approach up and down the line. You never want that outcome to be oh we underestimated the amount of traffic and now there's congestion right so another kind of crazy making thing about it is in transit planning you kind of do the opposite thing you never want to overestimate ridership because that always looks bad right? "The way that's discussed like this is just this worst thing you could possibly have and we must avoid this at all costs seems insane to me," he says.