[Petroski] has a clear eye, a mellifluous prose style and a knack for spicing deep research with personal anecdotes ... While Petroski sounds Cassandra-like alarms, he also offers informative pleasures. He gives a terrific account of a cross-country road trip young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower made with the military in 1919.
Petroski excels at revealing the origins of everyday, utilitarian things ... But The Road Taken is more than a straightforward history of innovation in road design. It argues forcefully that the United States ought to invest considerably more in its public works.
It would be great fun to drive or stroll with Mr. Petroski and pick his brain about the infrastructure one sees. He seems to know everything possible on the subject and adores it all. But this book, a labor of love, can sometimes be laborious for the reader. The Road Taken is replete with so much minutiae about everything connected to infrastructure that the general reader might become a bit bemused at times.
The discussions of roads and bridges largely deliver on the promise of providing a road map for current policy debates, from big national issues like federal highway funding to ones you’ve probably never thought of, like the lane markings issue. Unfortunately, other parts of the book wander without a clear destination. Through the book, Petroski uses his personal recollections of infrastructure to illustrate current issues in civil engineering. But many of the recollections could have been bypassed.
Petroski argues with passion and conviction for the restoration of our infrastructure—and the restoration of its centrality to public life. At times, however, Petroski seems to suffer from some of the tunnel vision of transportation engineers themselves: He is quite good at solving the problems he is asked to solve, but not often as good at seeing past the parameters of the solution.
