The term public-private partnerships, often abbreviated PPP, has come to include two very different arrangements. One arrangement, which I prefer to call franchises, has proven very successful. Advocates of the other arrangement, which I shall call corporatism because the name I prefer is too emotion-laden, are riding on the coattails of the success of franchises.
The Antiplanner discussed this subject six months ago. But the topic has come up in the comments so it is worth repeating.
Many of my posts in the last two months criticize planning and argue that, no matter who does it, planning is bound to fail. Yet some people are still planners. Who are these planners and why do they do it?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 31,650 urban & regional planners practicing in the United States. This probably does not include most forest planners working for the Forest Service, watershed planners working for the Corps of Engineers, or other agency planners. Yet national forest and other federal agency planning processes are remarkably similar to urban planning, so it is likely that these agencies hired at least a few urban planners to help them design their processes.
In 2005, planners earned an average of $57,620, meaning we spend close to $2 billion on planning salaries alone. This is not a large sum by government standards, but neither is it a trivial amount.
For my final essay during this Junk Science Week, I decided to focus on New Urbanism and Crime. If you’ve already read the article on this subject that appeared in Reason magazine two years ago, this will be redundant. But the story is so revealing of planners’ methods that it bears repeating.
In 2001, the American Planning Association published a book titled SafeScape that purported to show how certain urban designs can make neighborhoods safer from crime. Yet it was just junk science. In fact, to call it junk science might be too kind.
Today I am going to give urban planners a break and write about junk science related to western wildfire. In 2002, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon all saw the largest fires in their recorded histories. The national total number of acres burned that year was also a near record.
“Why so many large fires?” asks a Forest Service white paper. To answer, the paper quotes a General Accounting Office report: “The most extensive and serious problem related to health of national forests in the interior West is the over-accumulation of vegetation, which has caused an increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable and catastrophically destructive wildfires.”
Everyone knows that the suburbs made us fat. How do we know this? Because some junk scientists at some pro-planning advocacy groups put out a press release that claimed they had proven that suburbanites were fatter than city dwellers.
In fact, their research proved no such thing. But they did not hesitate to argue that their “proof” showed that America needs “to to invest in making America’s neighborhoods appealing and safe places to walk and bicycle,” which — to planners’ way of thinking — means rebuilding suburbs at higher densities.
I’ve previously discussed the myth that density relieves congestion, yet it persists. Most recently, planners in Fairfax County, Virginia say they want to put thousands of high-rise apartments in Tysons Corner in an effort to increase the density and relieve congestion around proposed rail stations.
Planners claim that Ballston, a rail station on the DC Orange line, proves that this strategy is successful. The opening of the Ballston station in 1979 led to a lot of transit-oriented development, and today many people in the area walk or take transit to work.
However, planners fail to mention that a major freeway, I-66, opened at about the same time, and it probably did more to stimulate development than the rail line. At least, other stations that were not close to new freeway interchanges failed to develop as planners hoped.
This is Junk Science Week at the Antiplanner. Each day, I will present an example of how planners rely on junk science to justify some of their more inane ideas. Today, I will focus on New Urbanism and the sense of community.
First, it is worthwhile asking why planners seem to believe in so much junk science. In previous posts, I’ve presented reasons why planning can’t work: the systems planners want to plan are simply too complicated for anyone to deal with. Because there is no real scientific support for planning, planners instead turn to junk science.
Imagine you are the director of a federal agency that gives grants to state and local governments. Suppose a researcher in your agency’s department finds that the local governments to which you give grants routinely lied on their grant applications in order to get the money.
Do you:
a. Root out and punish the states and cities that lied?
b. Tighten up your grantmaking procedures to make sure that future lies are exposed? or
c. Use your political power to have the researcher transferred to a dead-end job and ordered never to do research on your agency’s programs again?
Government planning fails because planners face the wrong incentives. Instead of being rewarded for doing good things for their communities, they are rewarded mainly for pleasing other planners. This incestuous system is a recipe for failure.
In a previous post, I listed seven reasons why government planning — that is, long-range, comprehensive planning that often regulates other people’s property — cannot work. I’ve discussed four reasons in detail, and now it is time to address reason number 5: the Incentive Problem.
According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual mobility reports, traffic delays due to congestion have been growing at nearly 8 percent per year since 1982. Those who closely scrutinize urban transportation planning in the U.S. increasingly believe that planners are doing everything they can to avoid solving this problem.
Case in point: Portland, Oregon, which sits astride the Willamette River and has ten roadway crossings of that river. One of them, the Sellwood Bridge, is structurally unsound and in 2004 the county engineer has banned all trucks and buses from the bridge. I can testify that the bridge is also one of the least bicycle-friendly bridges in the city.
