CSS for Transportation Professionals

When engineering decisions are public policy decisions.
What has happened gradually over the last fifty years -- approximately since the advent of the Interstate Highway System -- is the elevation of conventional traffic engineering to the status of public policy or even natural law. Instead of providing a means to attain goals set by the public and its elected officials, transportation engineers have gradually assumed responsibility for defining those goals.
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The changing transportation culture.
Traditionally the twin objectives of high speed and high levels of service yield an infrastructure agenda that consists almost entirely of plans to build new streets and roads, and to widen, straighten, and flatten existing ones. It was in response to this culture of "transportation as if nothing else mattered" that transportation agencies began to suffer the wrath of an outraged public. It was this sentiment that sparked the "asphalt rebellion" that has across the country, and the federal historic and environmental protection laws of the 1960's.
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Training topics in CSS.
The Context Sensitive Solutions approach is here to stay. But implementing such an extensive culture change requires new tools for highway engineers and project managers, and most of those new tools are not technical ones. True, new (or revived!) flexible design skills are needed, but transportation professionals also need training in: how to define problems more broadly; communications and consensus-building skills; and conflict-management skills. CSS training programs that address these needs are gaining in importance and spreading rapidly. But it's a big job: one transportation leader estimates that it takes at least five years to change the culture of a an agency as large as most DOTs, even with total commitment by upper management.
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