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Category Archives: Planning Disasters

More on Why Long-Range Planning Fails

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
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Commenter Dan says that my previous post on problems with long-range planning used “outdated examples,” so let’s look at a current example of long-range planning.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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See a Planning Disaster at the 2007 Preserving the American Dream Conference

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation
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San Jose is one of the greatest urban planning disasters in the country. As the heart of Silicon Valley, the region’s economy should be booming. Instead, growth was extremely slow in the 1990s–less than 0.7 percent per year–and the 2001 recession caused it to lose 17 percent of its jobs.

San Jose was probably the fastest-growing region in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining 40,000 people per year. But in 1974 a new city council decided to “save” San Jose from becoming like Los Angeles, which they thought was a sprawling, low-density region with too many freeways. So they drew an urban-growth boundary around San Jose, thus “saving” thousands of acres of marginal pasturelands from development. But the results turned out to be a disaster.

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Let Forest Planning Wither Away

By | | Planning Disasters, Public lands
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In 1976, Congress passed a law requiring all national forests to write long-term, comprehensive management plans. I remember attending a 1980 meeting of newly hired planners who were all excited about the opportunity to shape the future of 193 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

Their spirits were somewhat dampened when Professor Richard Behan, who later became dean of the Northern Arizona University school of forestry, predicted that planning would fail. He urged the Forest Service to simply ignore the law. The Forest Service ignored him. A decade and at least a billion dollars later (Behan thinks it was a lot more), some of the plans were still unfinished and those that were finished were ignored by forest managers who quickly realized they were worthless.

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