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Category Archives: Why Planning Fails

The Pace-of-Change Problem

By | | Public lands, Why Planning Fails
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In 1976, when Congress required the Forest Service to write comprehensive, long-range plans for each of the 100 or so national forests, the Chief of the Forest Service estimated that it would take about three years to write all the plans. In fact, it took eighteen.

Part of the problem was that planning took so long that reality changed in unexpected ways before the plan could be completed. Planners then had a choice of ignoring reality or starting over. Those who ignored reality delivered plans to forest managers that made no sense. Those who started over never really got done.

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More on Why Long-Range Planning Fails

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
25 Comments

Commenter Dan says that my previous post on problems with long-range planning used “outdated examples,” so let’s look at a current example of long-range planning. The Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) published its Metro Vision 2030, a long-range land-use plan for the Denver metro area, in 2005. That makes it a twenty-five year plan.

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Planning Creates Power Without Responsibility

By | | Public lands, Why Planning Fails
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David Schoenbrod is an attorney who once worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and now teaches at New York Law School. His 1993 book, Power Without Responsibility, argues that legislators often avoid responsibility for their actions by delegating power to bureaucracies. If the bureaucracies succeed, the legislators can take credit; if they fail, the legislators can blame the bureaucrats.

This explains why planning is so popular in a country that supposedly opposed central planning for most of the twentieth century. The planners gladly accept the power that legislators are so eager to delegate. Yet even the planners do not face any responsibility for their actions. If they screw up, their usual “punishment” will be more money and power to try to fix the problems they created.

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The Prediction Problem: Planners Aren’t Prophets

By | | Why Planning Fails
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During World War II, Kenneth Arrow–who would receive the Nobel Prize in economics in 1972–served as a part of the weather forecasting service for the Army Air Corps. As Peter Bernstein recounts in his 1998 book, Against the Gods, Arrow and his colleagues soon realized that their long-range forecasts were no better than numbers pulled out of a hat, and they asked to be assigned to more useful work.

“The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good,” they were told in reply. “However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

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Seven Reasons Why Government Planning Cannot Work

By | | Why Planning Fails
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“Planning is not radical doctrine,” some planners wrote soon after the fall of the centrally planned Soviet empire. “It is rational decision making.”

In fact, comprehensive, long-range planning cannot be rational decision making for the following reasons. I have discussed some of these reasons in detail in previous posts, and I will discuss the rest in future posts. But I thought it would be worthwhile listing them here.

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More on Modeling: Cities Are Queerer Than We Can Imagine

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
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Some planners and economists once built a model of their city. They assumed all the jobs were downtown and people wanted to minimize the combined cost of housing and commuting. How far, on average, would people live from work?

The model said, “One mile.” But census data showed that people actually lived an average of seven miles from work.

The planners and economists had totally opposite responses to this answer. The economists assumed there was something wrong with the model, and set about refining it. Instead of a monocentric model in which all jobs were downtown, they created a polycentric model that spread jobs across several different job centers. The revised model said people would live a little more than two miles from work.

“Naturally we don’t expect the real world to fit the model perfectly,” wrote the economists, “but being off by a factor of seven or even three is hard to swallow.” The economists concluded that the model needed much more refining.

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Engineers vs. Planners: Comparing Their Methods

By | | Transportation, Why Planning Fails
11 Comments

Jack Bogdanski was kind enough to link to this site, and one of his readers commented:

The Antiplanner doesn’t appear to be against just land-use planning… but rather ALL kinds of government planning. I’m baffled. Should government just proceed willy-nilly on whatever each bureaucrat’s personal whim is that day?”

In my opening post, I defined “government planning” as planning that is comprehensive, long-range, and/or deals with other people’s land and resources. This is the sort of planning that does not work.

I have no problem with government agencies that have narrowly defined missions doing the planning they need to do to carry out those missions. To distinguish this from “government planning” as defined above, I would call this mission-oriented planning organizing.

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The Modeling Problem: Garbage In, Gospel Out

By | | Why Planning Fails
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Planners by definition deal with complicated problems, and the only way to handle complicated problems is with models. Some models are computer programs. Others are simply in the heads of the people doing the planning. Either way, they are simplifications of reality.

For some purposes, simplifications can be useful. But when planning something as complicated as a national forest, urban area, or regional transportation system, planners fun up against what I call the Law of Modeling Limits:

Before a model becomes complicated enough to be useful for planning, it becomes too complicated for anyone to understand.”

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The Baptist Who Became a Bootlegger

By | | Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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Someone responded to my Baptists & bootleggers post by asking if I really had to mention the rape. The answer is “yes,” and not just because Wonkette started a trend of bloggers putting a sexual spin on all political news.

The Neil Goldschmidt story, including the statutory rape, is important because it shows how a Baptist became a bootlegger, and how everyone–the media, leading politicians, business leaders–continued to pretend he was a Baptist until the revelation of the rape came out. Only then did the media reveal to the public what a few had suspected all along: that all the stories of Portland’s light-rail utopia were merely a cover for a taxpayer-subsidized real-estate con.

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