For decades, traffic engineering meant moving cars. Planners decided that this is wrong and moved the discussion from moving cars to moving people; they said streets are not just for cars, trucks and buses, but also for pedestrians, bicycles, street cars, etc.

However, in the typical medium-to-large American city (i.e., with a metro area population of 1 million to 5 million people,) over 90 percent of the people move in cars and buses, and nearly 100 percent of the goods, move in trucks and cars. Also, in traditional and current traffic engineering practice, the service and safety of pedestrians is top priority.

So what are “Complete Streets” about? They are an excuse for government spending with undesirable economic, environmental and safety consequences, typically presented in the form of neighborhood beautification plans adorned with pleasant descriptions.

The City & County of Honolulu’s manual on Complete Streets states that: “Complete streets support healthy and sustainable communities through promoting physical activity, reducing vehicle emissions, increasing pedestrian and bicycle safety, and beautifying neighborhoods.” These pleasant descriptions do not match reality.

Let’s look at some results starting with Denver, a proactive Complete Streets city: Between 2000 and 2016, the share of those who drive alone changed from 84.9 to 84.5 percent; the share of those who walk or bike grew from 5.5 to 7.2 percent, at the expense of transit share, which dropped from 8.7 to 6.9 percent. These results question Denver’s investment in Complete Streets and $4.7 billion in transit expansion.

Earlier this year, Lawrence Solomon, a Canadian environmentalist, exclaimed, “Ban the Bike! How Cities Made a Huge Mistake in Promoting Cycling.” Bike lanes took parking from neighborhoods and adjoining businesses, increased city congestion and pollution, and drained city budgets. They reduced road capacity, slowed down transit service, inconvenienced courier, mail and supply deliveries, and increased crash risk.

In the case of King Street in Honolulu, the wide bike lane has created multiple hazards due to the high frequency of traffic from driveways that need to clear pedestrians on the sidewalk, bikers in the bike lane and deal with obstructed sight from parked vehicles.

The outcomes for bicyclists aren’t positive either: Compared to walkers, bicyclists inhale more than twice the dirty air adjacent to congested roads due to faster and deeper breathing, and expose themselves to a fatality rate that is eight times higher than motorists.

Promoting Complete Streets ignores anti-traffic policies of the past, such as pedestrian malls. (Let’s keep in mind that “traffic” is people going places, not a bunch of moving metal objects.) A number of pedestrian or transit malls have not worked well and have been converted back to general purpose use.

Examples include the Sacramento K Street, Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia and Main Street in Buffalo, N.Y. The removal of their traffic extinguished the bulk of business activity in these areas, causing significant economic and urban blight problems; all of these streets have been reopened to traffic.

By the way, we do have Complete Streets; they are called neighborhood streets with cars and trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, kids playing catch in the street, and dogs and cats. City arterial roads can become Complete Streets — at a high taxpayer expense, at a high business cost, at a high congestion, delay and pollution toll, and at a high injury risk.

Take a look at this complete street video from Washington, D.C. — vimeo.com/23743067 — and observe the clear risks on a sunny day, and imagine the same at nighttime and in inclement weather conditions.

I close with a copy of a poignant personal communication from 2014: “One insider at the US DOT calls this Policy by PowerPoint. They will do a bunch of hearings around each city and in a few months will have a ‘plan’ that says more dollars should go to the cities for complete streets.” The objective of Complete Streets is government spending guided by social engineering analysis. Economic, environmental and safety analyses are absent or superficial.

Clean and sustainable transportation will come with the bulk electrification and automation of urban vehicles. Technology, ingenuity and ride-sharing are solutions. Complete Streets are not.

Panos D. Prevedouros, Ph.D., is a transportation engineering professor and department chairman of civil/environmental engineering at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.