About a dozen years ago I had occasion to attend a 1-week course at the Univ. of MD called "Traffic Engineer Short Course". Basically, it was for traffic and design engineers to get required continuing education credits for their respective professions. I however, was, shall we say, an outsider - I was attending to see why these people did some of the stuff they did.
While I did learn some information, I did get one experienced traffic engineer to admit that a lot of what they did was busy work to justify their positions.
Personally, I would want to see the traffic counts and crash data of ANY intersection any DOT was going to modify. There should be a threshold in a number of crashes to volume of vehicles ratio. Especially the T-Bone, since that is what they are attempting to prevent.
Just my $0.02
