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Monthly Archives: January 2007

Boston: Success Story or Disaster?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Boston began planning for compact development and rail transit in the early 1970s under Governor Francis Sargent. Sargent appointed Alan Altshuler, a transportation professor at MIT, to be his Secretary of Transportation.

Sargent and Altshuler decided that freeways were destroying Boston, so in 1972 they cancelled almost all new highway construction inside route 128 (a beltway around Boston). They convinced Congress to allow states that cancelled urban interstates to spend the federal money allocated to the interstates on transit instead.

Since the money could only be spent on capital improvements, that meant rail transit; buses just weren’t expensive enough. ($100 million buys a lot of buses that the local government then has to operate, but it may buy only one rail line, so the operating cost obligations are a lot lower.)

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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
21 Comments

“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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Data Sources and Definitions

By | | Housekeeping
19 Comments

Several responses to some of my posts have asked for sources of the data I cite. While it is perfectly appropriate to ask this, the data usually aren’t critical to my main point, which is that planning does more harm than good.

Rather than provide links to every number (which is especially difficult for census data), I would like to list some of my most important sources of data here. I’ll also clarify my use of terms such as “city,” “urbanized area,” etc.

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More on Modeling: Cities Are Queerer Than We Can Imagine

By | | Regional planning, Why Planning Fails
16 Comments

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 Best-Laid Schemes

By | | Mission
4 Comments

Sometime in the late eighteenth century, Robert Burns drove a plough through a field mouse’s nest. He could see that the mouse had worked hard to build the nest, and he had destroyed all that work in an instant. As an apology, he wrote the poem titled, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, With The Plough,” containing the following stanza:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

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