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.
For example, compare the way state highway departments were run from about 1920 through 1980 or so with they way transportation departments are run today. For the first fifty or sixty years, highway departments were run by engineers, not planners. At least since 1991, most transportation planning has been done by planners, not engineers.
People view engineering today as a rather practical profession, but civil engineers in the early twentieth century were idealists inspired by the Progressive movement of scientific government. A discussion of Progressivism deserves its own full post, so let’s leave that aside for now. But it is important to understand that, as scientific managers, the engineers saw their job as one of maximizing the net social benefits of transportation by developing quantifiable measures of what they produced.
The engineers soon decided that their first priority was safety and their second priority was the efficient movement of people and goods, both of which could be easily quantified. Related to these two was the smoothness and quality of the road surfaces people traveled on, and these could also be quantified. The engineers judged their performance based on these measures.
Due to a lack of funds, highway construction made little progress for the first two decades of the twentieth century. But in 1919, the Oregon legislature adopted the idea (first used in England) of taxing gasoline and dedicating such “user fees” to highways. In little more than a decade, every other state imitated Oregon’s law, and by 1930 the vast majority of road costs came out of such user fees.
I don’t think the engineers planned it this way, but these user fees became a valuable feedback mechanism for the highway departments. Roads that generated little traffic produced few gas taxes. So highway departments would resist the efforts of a pork-barrelling legislator to build an expensive bridge to nowhere. Since the highways were largely self funding, legislators tended to leave the departments alone.
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The engineers also systematically experimented with new techniques and reported on those experiments. Was parallel parking safer than diagonal parking? What was the best way of designing various sorts of intersections? When were one-way streets safer and more efficient than two way? Most of their studies counted numbers of accidents and traffic flows before and after installation of some new device. If the device–traffic lights, one-way streets, grooved pavement–offered significant advantages, it would be adopted by many highway departments (though most would conduct their own experiments to confirm the results).
The results turned out to be almost uniformly positive. People got roads where they needed them. The departments got the funding for building and maintaining the roads. The engineers monitored the roads and expanded them where they found congestion, adding safety measures where they found hazards.
“The inclination of the engineers to whom road-planning is largely entrusted has been to define and apply appropriate standards in transportation terms,” observed University of Michigan economist Shorey Peterson in 1950. “It is in the character for the engineer to be mainly concerned, not with broad matters of public interest, but with specific relations between road types and traffic conditions.”
Attempting to account for some nebulous “public interest,” Peterson warned, would lead to “the wildest and most irreconcilable differences of opinion.” Without specific, quantifiable benchmarks, no one could say for sure where road should go. “Controlled in this way, highway projects are peculiarly subject to ‘pork barrel’ political grabbing.”
The downfall of the engineers began in the late 1960s and 1970s when inflation drove up construction costs but not gas tax revenues. Although urban freeways also became controversial at this time, as UCLA planning Professor Brian Taylor observed in Access magazine (4.2 mb pdf), it was really inflation that shut down urban roadbuilding programs.
The resulting congestion fed arguments that “you can’t build your way out of congestion” and “new roads simply induce more traffic.” Planners used these arguments along with the urban freeway controversies to persuade Congress to turn transportation planning power over to them rather than the engineers. Congress did so in 1991.
Instead of setting concrete goals such as safety and the efficient movement of traffic, planners set nebulous goals such as urban livability and downtown revitalization. Instead of using quantitative measures such as fatalities per billion passenger miles and passenger miles per hour per lane mile, planners focused on qualitative things like people’s sense of community, neighborhood stability, and aesthetics.
The results have been exactly as Shorey Peterson predicted. Transportation plans today are based more on political power than on scientific management.
The engineers provided an example of how government agencies can plan or organize their activities. To be successful, such plans should focus on a narrow mission, use quantifiable measures, and receive feedback from some form of user fees. if any of these three things are absent, the government plan will fail.
You are crating a false premise by implying that maximizing vehicular throughput is the highest and best good to be achieved by designing a transportation network.
If this were true, agents along proposed expansions of ROWs would gladly succumb, Kelo-like to takings of their land for this good.
Instead, this premise neglects externalities and other non-market goods valued by agents that take precedence over maximized vehicular throughput.
DS
Dan,
“You are crating a false premise by implying that maximizing vehicular throughput is the highest and best good. . . this premise neglects externalities.”
You misread that implication. What I said was that when you try to take into account all of the externalities you make planning impossible to judge on firm quantitative grounds. This creates openings for politicians to interfere in the planning process.
It is much better to let the transportation engineers optimize safety and vehicle flows and take care of the externalities in other ways. Emissions controls, for example, have been extraordinarily successful in reducing pollution, while attempts to reduce VMT have been completely unsuccessful at reducing pollution (and in some cases have actually increased it).
when you try to take into account all of the externalities you make planning impossible to judge on firm quantitative grounds.
Planning is decisioning on priorities. No one prioritizes action to account for all externalities, and I challenge you to name specifics in this regard.
It is much better to let the transportation engineers optimize safety and vehicle flows and take care of the externalities in other ways.
No its not, else we’d still let them do it. Plans of such a magnitude as your post implies are created with teams. Engineers are merely one component of a team, as they are not trained in other things to an appropriate level.
If you were a practicing planner, this wouldn’t even be a discussion item. As you are not, you are not familiar with how things work on the ground.
while attempts to reduce VMT have been completely unsuccessful at reducing pollution (and in some cases have actually increased it)
Excellent! The presumption is, by your argumentation, that transpo guys know how to reduce VMT. Pray tell, what do they say?
DS
BTW, I’m still waiting for my reply on Ricardian land rents to post, so I can see your reply. Thank you ever so much.
DS’s error, IMO, is that most of the externalities are caused by congested traffic flow. Free flowing traffic reduces emissions, increases fuel economy, reduces traffic diversions through neighborhood streets, wastes less time, and generally improves the population’s mood.
Dan,
“The presumption is, by your argumentation, that transpo guys know how to reduce VMT.” No, the presumption is that planners approach pollution by trying to reduce VMT while engineers approach pollution by reducing tailpipe emissions. The engineering approach has dramatically reduced pollution. The planning approach has done little, nothing, or made pollution worse.
Ah, the difficulties in blog comments. Thank you Randal.
As tailpipe emissions have decreased, I’d like to see your empirical evidence that attempts to reduce VMT have done little, nothing, or made pollution worse; that is: rather than some offhand statement, what evidence do you have.
Reference please.
Thank you in advance.
DS
“I’d like to see your empirical evidence that attempts to reduce VMT have done little, nothing, or made pollution worse…”
Here in planners paradise, Portland, OR, all you have to do is take a look around. Every freeway is packed at rush hour with cars stopping and starting (ie wasting gas and emitting more pollution than if free flowing). Good thing our imperial government spent so much on light rail, it’s really done a number on reducing congestion….
Thanks for the anecdotal evidence, Chris.
Empirical evidence would have held population constant and quantify, say, decline/growth in SOV miles vs transit ridership.
Nonetheless, I look forward to your wish being enacted, and all the Kelo/M37 claims from all the ROW eminent domain takings. What, you say?
You know, from the massive freeway building to relieve the congestion and make traffic free-flowing. Let us know how that works for you. I’m sure it will catch on and spread to the rest of the country too, what with all those Kelo-lite bills passing lately…
DS
Seems you condone eminent domain taking when it comes to light rail and street cars, Dan. Or, in an attempt to avoid such nastiness, Portland simply removes a lane of vehicular traffic for their toy trains. Then they give tax breaks to businesses to build around these rail lines.
Makes a lot of sense.
Also, I don’t need empirical evidence to know MAX has had a minimal (if any) effect on Portland’s freeway congestion.
Seems you condone eminent domain taking when it comes to light rail and street cars, Dan
As I’ve given exactly zero evidence for such, you have no basis for that assumption.
Also, I don’t need empirical evidence to know MAX has had a minimal (if any) effect on Portland’s freeway congestion.
Excellent. You’ve noticed the population has grown faster than has freeway capacity _and_ public transportation capacity. That’s a lotta growth.
You should lead a citizen’s charge to expand freeway capacity. Do a survey and share with us how much higher folks are willing to tax themselves to purchase ROWs and pay for T&M.
DS
Dan: Nonetheless, I look forward to your wish being enacted, and all the Kelo/M37 claims from all the ROW eminent domain takings. What, you say?
JK: You need to pay attention:
Kelo is about taking land, through condemnation, to sell/give to a non-government party. It has nothing to do with land for public facilities.
M37 is not about taking land, through condemnation It is about taking land through restricting uses of land.
Dan: You know, from the massive freeway building to relieve the congestion and make traffic free-flowing.
JK: In Portland, has we used the land for asphalt, instead of tracks, two of our major congestion problems would have been solved. The key is that a rail line takes about the same space as traffic lane, but only caries 1/3 as many commuters and the rail costs several times what a freeway lane costs. see http://www.debunkingportland.com/Transit/RailAttractsDrivers.htm
Dan: (quoting his opponent) Also, I don’t need empirical evidence to know MAX has had a minimal (if any) effect on Portland’s freeway congestion.
Dan: Excellent. You’ve noticed the population has grown faster than has freeway capacity _and_ public transportation capacity. That’s a lotta growth.
JK: The idiot planners planned for the housing for all those people, but totally screwed up the transportation system. They counted on rail, which doesn’t relieve congestion. This is a good example of planning done by a political process – totally screwed.
Dan: Do a survey and share with us how much higher folks are willing to tax themselves to purchase ROWs and pay for T&M.
JK: That’s the really sad part. We had the money. The planners just wasted it on rail instead of investing is roads.
Thanks
JK