Stormwater and traffic studies: the questions for your engineer

1 · Learn the move · Red-team audit

The stormwater report and the traffic impact study are where a 28-acre site quietly becomes a 21-acre site with a turn lane. They are written by engineers, reviewed by engineers, and read by developers mostly for the conclusion paragraph. You are not going to out-engineer them, and the model certainly is not. What you can do is read them the way a reviewer does: for the assumptions the conclusion depends on. A red-team audit gives the model named places to look. Inputs the report states without a source. Assumptions about your program that are not your program. Scenarios the scope left out. Mitigation that costs land or money. Anything deferred 'to final design'. Each finding becomes a quoted line and one question for your civil or traffic engineer. The rules keep the model on the right side of the line: it never recalculates a runoff figure or a trip count, never says a study is adequate or deficient, and never says a mitigation will be accepted. It produces the question list that makes a one-hour call with your engineer worth the fee.

Red-team the study below. Look for: (1) inputs stated with no source, (2) assumptions about the project that differ from my program, (3) scenarios the scope excludes, (4) mitigation that takes land or money, (5) anything deferred to final design. Quote each line and turn it into one question for my engineer. Do not recalculate anything and do not judge the study adequate. [study] [my program]