I am not sure of the value of requiring continuing education for PE, especially as outlined in the proposed regulation. 

All engineers I've come in contact with in my 42 years since graduation have been very inquisitive have always been looking for newer, better, more productive ways for  coming up with  engineering solutions.

In my area of mechanical engineering I've seen tremendous change. We have learned to move from the slide rules, to hand held calculators, to programable calculators, to desktop computers with undreamed of  power. The techniques we used have gone from simple closed form solutions, to recursive protocols, to finite element / finite difference iterative techniques, to amazingly sophisticated multi physics programs. The materials we work with and our understanding of their behavior in extreme environments is also very very much more sophisticated today. I have had to increase my depth of knowledge in several field as part of my job. One always comes up with areas not as well covered in our formal education as is required to solve a problem in our day to day work. I needed more knowledge on psychrometry to solve a recryalization of potassium nitrate problem in an industrial environment.  I needed to better understand fracture mechanics, failure mechanisms, heat treatment, decarburization, weld metalurgy,  and electron beam welding for the design of rocket motors, without that additional knowledge I was useless to my employer. Being a professional, I wanted the additional knowledge, I always want to know how something works, how could I make it failproof or at least failed in a safe mode.

That doesn't even begin to touch on the change to electronics, and photonics. What has happend in the transportation field with the trucks, cars, and construction infrastructure is simply amazing.

If engineers haven't kept abrest of change they are simply irelavent. I don't know that adding a few hours of continuing education will make the public any safer. The market place will weed out  any who don't keep up. If we need some certification that engineers are still up on their proffesional skill maybe we need to require a full PE exam test at every renewal.  A course or two every year administered by who knows who certainly will not increase the professionalism of the regulants. All the engineers I'm familiar with have these same characteristics.

By the way, was the requirement for 16 hours purposely set to require more than 1 semester hour for accredation or was it just not thought through?

I think the proposed changes have not received receive enough thought. The  objectives need to be better articulated and then the linkage between the objectives and requirements need to be clearly stated.