Planning for the Unpredictable

How do you plan for the unpredictable? That’s the question facing the more than 400 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that have been tasked by Congress to write 20-year transportation plans for their regions. Self-driving cars will be on the market in the next ten years, are likely to become a dominant form of travel in twenty years, and most people think they will have huge but often unknowable transformative effects on our cities and urban areas. Yet not a single regional transportation plan has tried to account for, and few have even mentioned the possibility of, self-driving cars.

Instead, many of those plans propose obsolete technologies such as streetcars, light rail, and subways. These technologies made sense when they were invented a hundred or so years ago, but today they are just a waste of money. One reason why planners look to the past for solutions is that they can’t accurately foresee the future. So they pretend that, by building ancient modes of transportation, they will have the same effects on cities that they had when they were first introduced.

If the future is unpredictabie, self-driving cars make it doubly or quadruply so.

  • How long will it take before self-driving cars dominate the roads?
  • Will people who own self-driving cars change their residential locations because they won’t mind traveling twice as far to work?
  • Will employment centers move so they can take advantage of self-driving trucks and increased employee mobility?
  • Will car sharing reduce the demand for parking?
  • Will carpooling reduce VMT or will the increased number of people who can “drive” self-driving cars increase VMT?
  • Will people use their cars as “robotic assistants,” going out with zero occupants to pick up groceries, drop off laundry, or doing other tasks that don’t require lots of supervision?
  • Will self-driving cars reduce the need for more roads because they increase road capacities, or will the increase in driving offset this benefit?
  • Will self-driving cars provide the mythical “first and last miles” needed by transit riders, or will they completely replace urban transit?

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Planners from the MPOs in Seattle and Atlanta asked participants at the recent Autonomous Vehicle Symposium to help them incorporate self-driving cars in their regional transportation models. Yet the consensus was that no one has any idea about the answers to these questions. The only prediction that people could come close to agreeing upon was that self-driving cars will increase miles of driving as people take advantage of greater mobility more than they increase carpooling.

Self-driving cars are not a black swan amidst the flock of knowns about urban planning; they are a whole flock of black swans any one of which could completely sink even the most accurate predictions about all the others.

Some of the planners believed they could make guesses about the effects of self-driving cars and use them to make “sensitivity runs” to estimate the possible magnitude of the effects of self-driving cars on cities. But even if they made such runs, they would have no idea which runs will come close to reality.

“There are no models in planning practices that can predict the emergence of new modes and forms of mobility,” admitted one planner. “Our models haven’t even got the Internet yet. They haven’t got the cell phone. They’re not going to have autonomous cars.” Another agreed: “ITS [intelligent transportation systems] is 25 years old, but our models still don’t account for it.”

We are about to introduce a new technology that will completely transform our society in unpredictable ways, and many of those transformations will start changing travel behaviors and land-use patterns well before 20 years are up. The fact that the plans are revised every five years doesn’t help since many of these plans include costly investments in projects that take decades to complete. Even if new information reveals that those investments are no longer appropriate, once begun the political pressure to complete the projects will likely be too great for future officials to resist.

This means it is not enough to simply rewrite transportation planning models. Instead, we need to rewrite the entire process of urban planning.

  1. Instead of writing 20-year plans that pretend to know what a city will need in the distant future, planners should only write short-term plans that solve today’s problems without foreclosing options for the future;
  2. Planning processes should be streamlined so that it no longer takes ten or more years to plan, design, and build facilities that, a few decades ago, were built in a couple of years;
  3. Urban areas should avoid infrastructure projects that take decades to build and would make sense only if people completely changed their lifestyles;
  4. Instead, new transportation facilities should be generic in the sense that they can be used by a wide variety of modes and easily adopted for whatever modes become dominant in the future.

If some of these suggestions sound familiar, it is because I have made them before (particularly in The Best-Laid Plans). The future is unpredictable even without self-driving cars, and I’ve had little faith in the ability of long-range plans to cope with those unpredictabilities. But now even the planners are willing to admit that they can’t cope with the unpredictable effects of this new technology. I hope that at least some of them are willing to tell that to Congress, which created the requirement for 20-year plans, that it needs to change the rules.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

31 Responses to Planning for the Unpredictable

  1. metrosucks says:

    Bravo Mr. O’Toole:

    a fine post today, one that will no doubt rub planners the wrong way. The most important admission I see here is that planners do NOT know what the hell they are doing, so these worthless rail empire building plans are no more than extremely expensive shots in the dark. And one thing we do know for sure is that these rail boondoggles are certain to fail. In a world that is increasingly decentralizing, building super expensive, inflexible transit lines to a increasingly irrelevant central city is a ridiculous proposition. Happily, people are beginning to fight back, though.

  2. Sandy Teal says:

    Please Antiplanner, please do not ask planners to try to plan for self-driving cars. I think the answers to your questions are not clear and we should just wait to see what develops. The self-driving cars add a lot of flexibility to the system and probably will result in a lot that we don’t even imagine right now.

  3. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    The Antiplanner wrote:

    We are about to introduce a new technology that will completely transform our society in unpredictable ways, and many of those transformations will start changing travel behaviors and land-use patterns well before 20 years are up. The fact that the plans are revised every five years doesn’t help since many of these plans include costly investments in projects that take decades to complete. Even if new information reveals that those investments are no longer appropriate, once begun the political pressure to complete the projects will likely be too great for future officials to resist.

    Many fair points above.

    But the bottom line is this – people will still need to travel (regardless of mode, unless travel is severely limited or outlawed), and those long-range forecasts (note the use of the word forecast and not plan) are still needed, especially for improvements that may be financed by tolls or other user fees.

    This means it is not enough to simply rewrite transportation planning models. Instead, we need to rewrite the entire process of urban planning.

    1. Instead of writing 20-year plans that pretend to know what a city will need in the distant future, planners should only write short-term plans that solve today’s problems without foreclosing options for the future;

    Long-range plans attempt to estimate what will be needed (especially if growth in population or employment are expected).

    2. Planning processes should be streamlined so that it no longer takes ten or more years to plan,
    design, and build facilities that, a few decades ago, were built in a couple of years;

    Much (not all, but much) of that is due to federal laws passed since the mid-1960’s.

    3. Urban areas should avoid infrastructure projects that take decades to build and would make sense only if people completely changed their lifestyles;

    Yet that is what more than a few elected officials desire and want (note that I am not saying I agree with them).

    4. Instead, new transportation facilities should be generic in the sense that they can be used by a wide variety of modes and easily adopted for whatever modes become dominant in the future.

    Agreed – the worst offenders in this regard are rail transit systems, which tend to be specific to one city or metropolitan area only (the New York City subways have two (IRT and BMT/IND), generally incompatible systems, as well as four mostly incompatible commuter rail systems (PATH (could be considered a subway system of its own), Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Railroad and N.J. Transit).

  4. Dan says:

    Randal, you are pretending that your blockbuster questions are unanswerable. Therefore the sainted Market can’t answer it either. So I guess we do nothing because people aren’t smart enough to figger hit out!

    DS

  5. metrosucks says:

    That’s the way sociopathic government planners are indoctrinated to think: if they aren’t smart enough to figure it out, no one is! All they can do then is make ignorant cracks about the market, which they could never begin to understand through the veil of mental illness and hatred of freedom that clouds their judgment.

  6. the highwayman says:

    In a post employment economy, there is no need to go any where.

  7. metrosucks says:

    Andrew, your doctor called, he said you’re off your meds again.

  8. gilfoil says:

    The future is unpredictable. Sometimes even downtowns recover from decades of neglect. I wonder if it will keep happening?

    http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/local/2014/07/17/cincy-has-up-and-coming-downtown/12799891/

  9. the highwayman says:

    Maybe I should retire and go on welfare just like the rest of you.

  10. gattboy says:

    love the hyperbole! WW3 will be fought on transit lines? Crazy!

    Anyways, guess what? We already have all this technology and have had it for decades. Its called chauffeurs, taxis, car services, etc. Don’t want to drive a single-occupant vehicle around all day doing errands? You already have options to eliminate that. But it’s very very VERY expensive for the average middle-class suburb dweller right?

    So really we’re talking about whether computerization will push down these costs. In a century, sure. In a decade or two, perhaps not. And will eliminating another avenue of working class HUMAN employment really be so acceptable? We’ll see…

    We all know that Mike Bloomberg and the other billionaires have owned chauffeur-driven limos since the 70s and car phones since the 80s and private aircraft since the 90s… so lets just really move this discussion forward and ask when the average middle class suburban-sprawl family, will own a robot helicopter? Getting rid of roads altogether will save SO MUCH tax money of course…

  11. gilfoil says:

    Imagine the ease of life of not having to drive yourself around everywhere. It’s coming in only a few decades in the future. Or, you can experience it now by living in a city.

  12. the highwayman says:

    Horses have brains and they have pulled wagons for humans for millennia, but what you’re after is some thing sinister.

  13. the highwayman says:

    @Gattboy Good point with VTOL cars too.

    http://moller.com/dev/

  14. Sandy Teal says:

    Antiplanner –

    Here is a tough but very important challenge for the self driving cars if they are going to permeate society: Dropping off and picking up kids from school.

    Lots of challenges there.

  15. Tombdragon says:

    Dan, first of all we have to acknowledge a few things. First the “market” is more successful than the bogus “plans” that have been forced upon us by institutional planners. The ONLY way for “planners” to get the attention of the “market” is to pay them to institute their plans that don’t work, because people can’t/won’t pay market rate for them. Third we really don’t have any idea how the market will accept self driving cars, but we can assume that the individual will not embrace them universally, but commercially I think this is quite an up and coming new technology for moving goods, services, and labor to the consumer.

  16. Dan says:

    Tom, Randal is trying to pretend that the future is unknowable, therefore we can’t do anything. All these corporations, militaries, countries, localities, companies, people…they just shouldn’t bother.

    DS

  17. Not Sure says:

    What kind of planning are you folks talking about? There’s a difference between planning for what you think will happen while being willing to make adjustments if it turns out people want something different and planning for what you want to happen and attempting to force those who don’t share your vision to go along with you.

  18. metrosucks says:

    and planning for what you want to happen and attempting to force those who don’t share your vision to go along with you.

    Not sure, in most cases residents do not agree with planners’ ideas when they are honestly laid out, which is why planners use lies, astroturf support, legal loopholes, and just plain ignoring people to force their plans through. This is well documented and most are aware of these sort of shenanigans.

    What used to be the game of small time, corrupt county commissioners in some backwater Mississippi county is now big business all over the country.

    People want planners to serve them, the public, and do the job of providing services that the taxpayers desire, not force some foolish, myopic vision on residents at their own expense, while corrupt contractors profit on the back end.

  19. Tombdragon says:

    No Dan, I’m pretty sure Randal is pointing out that the planning profession has turned out to be and abject failure in most every place it has been tried, and the private sector is more successful, without the additional cost and government overhead.

  20. prk166 says:

    “Randal is trying to pretend that the future is unknowable, therefore we can’t do anything. All these corporations, militaries, countries, localities, companies, people…they just shouldn’t bother.” – Dan

    Pretend? There is no pretending. We do not know the future.

    I think Mr. O’Toole was clear that the lack of certainty that the future holds for us should lead us to be weary of implementing plans that are designed as though we know the future. For example, he writes :

    “new transportation facilities should be generic in the sense that they can be used by a wide variety of modes and easily adopted for whatever modes become dominant in the future”

  21. prk166 says:

    I’m curious to see if self-driving cars work and if they do if catch on at all. Remember, we don’t know the future. They could turn out to be this era’s version of the flying car.

    If they do work and do catch on, the question isn’t just how will our habits change but how will businesses change. For example, the car sharing model could really take off. Why bother owning a car if whenever you need to go someplace, you just pop up an app, tap a button and one shows up at your house a few minutes later?

    If that’s the case, I’m especially curious what that could do for transit, parking ramps, for taxis and for traffic. Whether or not I own the car, I can now take a self driving car to work. Who cares if I’m stuck on the Valley Highway for an extra 20 minutes while going downtown. I could have my laptop open and get some work done while my car or be on the phone on a conference call while the car takes me directly from my residence and drops me off in front of my work place. The car then goes and parks itself.

    Keep in mind that most transit systems politically rely on support of the middle class downtown office worker. A large portion of them take it because they don’t want to drive in rush hour traffic and shell out $10 – $20 / day to park downtown. They want the service to avoid those things. If you own a self driving car, it can just go find “free” street parking 3 or 6 miles away and park itself until you tell it to come pick you up.

    If the car that took you downtown is part of car sharing, it will go find it’s the next trip. If that’s the case, there could be a glut of cars in the central city during the day time which in turn would put downward pressure on prices. That in turn would encourage residents there to opt for the convenience of direct service over fixed-route transit. In a generation could we find ourselves with transit agencies, especially those with rail lines, with high fixed costs unable to cover even 10% of their costs with fares? Will this erode political support for these tax payer funded agencies?

    Keep in mind that often times big changes occur when we have several technologies and social shifts occurring around the same time. For example, what we refer to as fracking is a whole bunch of technological innovations happening at the same time: hydraulic fracturing, horizontal drilling, the ability to drill wells 3 to 6 miles long and come within inches of a target, rig innovations that require less manual labor and lead to faster drilling, etc. In the case of the driverless car we have what we call the cloud, work places used to workers working remotely ( laptops, network storage, VPNs, etc ) and some requiring that 5, 10 or 25% of their employees do so, wireless data services with robust coverage in urban areas, apps like Uber and Lyft and smart phones ( aka a tiny powerful portable computer ), car sharing companies – some for-profit and some co-ops – popping up all over, etc.

    Personally I would have loved to have a driverless car for my weekend trip. We could have simply skipped getting a hotel room, loaded the kids in the mini van at the end of the night and had the car drive us 4 hours back home while we snoozed.

  22. Dan says:

    prk, such argumentation seeks to sow doubt and seeks to distract us from the maxim f we wait for all the right conditions to be met we would never end up doing anything.

    HTH

    DS

  23. metrosucks says:

    if we wait for all the right conditions to be met we would never end up doing anything.

    So let’s get started on all that rail and density right now, with waivers for our friends msetty, Dan Staley, and all other smart growth advocates with a suitable excuse like “my wife won’t let me live in a mixed use building”.

  24. Tombdragon says:

    Right conditions? More of that failed planning mantra. Those “planned outcomes” Dan, are further away than ever here in Portland, and this acceleration of Light Rail, Streetcars and Transit Oriented Development, Urban Renewal, and the Urban Growth Boundary has bankrupted many residents and driven business out of the area. A lower percentage of commuters uses transit now that we have Light Rail, and Streetcar – is that the “planned outcome” you work toward Dan – are those the “right conditions”? Transit Oriented Development, Urban Renewal, and the Urban Growth Boundary has narrowed the appeal of Portland for Business, and residents. The Institutional Planning profession is inept and morally bankrupt, and I believe are requirements to enter the Profession.

  25. Frank says:

    Dan is just having a sad. Probably a left over sad from being unemployed (see page 140—this is his “partner’s” testimony). Now he’s a consultant! That’s a euphemism for “my wife pays for everything and I have a small penis.”

    Poor, poor Dan with his broken crystal ball. And his massive suburban house with massive garage. Well, not his. His mother-in-laws’ home. It’s almost like he lives in his mom’s basement. You would think that would disqualify him for serving on the local amateur government since he’s not actually a home owner, which the law would seem to require. Maybe they allow people who live in their mother-in-law’s basements to serve on government boards. Who knows? I’m sure the planner will set me straight.

    It’s not like Dan’s a real master’s degree earner.

    Dan loves to lie.

  26. Dan says:

    TomB, as you know, the “right conditions” – as your mom and dad told you – never come. So everybody has to do something. See, the military, corporations, governments, businesses, all plan pretty much the same way, despite what some want you to believe. That’s how the world works.

    DS

  27. metrosucks says:

    the “right conditions” – as your mom and dad told you – never come.

    Yes, you see, this is why Danny boy is living in the suburbia he supposedly hates, while he was “planning” (sic) on living in a high density, mixed use building all along. Him and every other smart growth supporter living in the suburbs.

  28. prk166 says:

    “prk, such argumentation seeks to sow doubt and seeks to distract us from the maxim f we wait for all the right conditions to be met we would never end up doing anything.” – Dan

    No, it does not. It means we need to be conscious of what we know – e.g. gravity accelerates an object at 9.8 m/s – and what we believe may occur. That is, we need to acknowledge that we do not know the future, we can only make educated _guesses_.

    As Mr. O’Toole clearly points out, there are still things we can do. They need to be tempered and done in a way that acknowledges the future will be different from out educated _guesses_.

    As for planning, look at a very simple thing we could predict. In building the Central Corridor, planners predicted that the new light rail would run a couple minutes faster than it’s comparable bus route, the 50. Now that they’ve built it, it’s about 10 minutes slower. Despite having very few variables, they didn’t know the future.

    Scale this sort of thing up, do it over time, and our educated _guesses_ about the future can be very wrong.

  29. metrosucks says:

    prk166, the light rail was slower than expected because the misplaced $50 trillion dollars stolen from transit users (as msetty would say) tore a hole in the space-time continuum and made the train appear extra slow. The only way to fix this flaw is to invest 100% of the Twin City’s monies in building light rail and streetcars until the contractors are fat & happy.

  30. Dan says:

    As for planning, look at a very simple thing we could predict.

    Exactly the reasons why, prk, predictions are not made and instead projections are made. Which is my point.

    DS

  31. Tombdragon says:

    Predictions vs. projections? Really? We used to have traffic engineers find or “engineer” solutions and they were much more successful in their ability to “project” use and capacity. If intersections were built and they didn’t work, traffic ENGINEERS would LEARN from the FAILURE, or miscalculation, and infrastructure would be torn out and rebuilt. We never seem to tear our and rework failed planning, Dan, planners never seem to learn from mistakes, and seem to have prove their failed “projections” over and over, and over – ad nauseum, at tremendous social and economic cost. These mistakes should see planners FIRED for maleficence, but since the “profession” has been embraced by the bureaucracy, as a way to capture Federal dollars. “planners” are no longer admonished for their failures, and nothing is ever learned. At least those “Evil” developers that are chasing the dollar for economic reward are honest about their intentions, planners are not.

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