The Department of Transportation is inviting comments on a proposed change in the rules for metropolitan transportation planning. Under the current rules, every metropolitan planning organization (MPO) must write a long-range (20 years) transportation plan and update it every five years, as well as a short-range transportation improvement plan that lists that projects the organization expects to fund in its region.
Some urbanized areas, however, have multiple metropolitan planning organizations. For example, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach each have their own metropolitan planning organizations even though (since 2000) they are in the same urbanized area. The proposed rule would require the MPOs to submit a single long-range transportation plan for the entire urbanized area.
On one hand, the purpose of MPOs in the first place is to save the federal government from having to review thousands of grant proposals from the thousands of different cities and counties that make up the nation’s urban areas. Thus, this represents a streamlining from the federal government’s point of view since it reduces the number of grant proposals it will have to deal with.
On the other hand, Jane Jacobs once defined a region as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” Long-range transportation plans are absurd enough; making them cover larger and larger regions just makes them more out of touch with reality.
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The definitions of urbanized areas are arbitrary in any case. In the same year that the federal government merged Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach into one area, it split San Francisco-Oakland into three areas by creating the Concord and Livermore urbanized areas and the Los Angeles urbanized area into Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, and Mission Viejo urbanized areas. Everyone agrees that San Jose is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, yet it has never been part of the San Francisco-Oakland urbanized area.
Instead of reshuffling the boundaries of metropolitan planning areas, the federal government should give up on the idea of long-range planning entirely. Long-range planning presumes that planners can accurately predict the future, that their plans can respond to those predictions, and that they can adjust their plans periodically as they gain more information. None of these are true.
Planners clearly can’t predict the future. No one knows what gasoline prices will be a year from now much less five or ten years from now, yet those prices are one of the most important factors in transport behavior. Even if they could predict the future, most plans are more responsive to planners’ preconceived notions than to reality. Once written, special interest groups that benefit from the plans organize to keep the plans locked in place even after they have been shown to fail.
Comments on the proposed planning rule are due August 26. Though some people have asked for a 60-day extension, it won’t take 60 days for the Antiplanner to write comments urging that the rules be rewritten to deemphasize the long-range plan.
In 1940, a 20 year plan would have to plan for jet airports (for the 707), with their longer runways, before the first jet was mass produced in Germany. This is further evidence that planners are deluded when they produce 20 year plans – they actually believe thay can predict the future 20 years out.
see: http://www.debunkingportland.com/50yrplan.html
Planners are fascists: http://www.debunkingportland.com/planners_are_fascists.html
Thanks
JK
Jim’s point regarding jets is so true.
As the late great Michael Crichton explained: “Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horse manure? Horse pollution was bad in 1900; think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?”
He then summarized: “Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.”
And the long range plans submitted over the decades prove how wrong they can be. But think of how much money is made doing these long range plans – and that is why they will never stop doing them.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Some urbanized areas, however, have multiple metropolitan planning organizations. For example, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach each have their own metropolitan planning organizations even though (since 2000) they are in the same urbanized area. The proposed rule would require the MPOs to submit a single long-range transportation plan for the entire urbanized area.
IIRC, either Florida state law; or perhaps the Florida Department of Transportation; or perhaps Florida tradition – requires that each Florida county that has sufficient urbanized area (UZA) population under federal rules must have its own MPO, even when they are closely connected (as, for example, Miami-Dade and Broward (Fort Lauderdale) Counties obviously are).
Same holds true in the Tampa Bay area – Hillsborough and Pinellas (St. Petersburg) Counties have separate MPOs.
Probably several more examples like this in Florida, but I suppose this is enough for our purpose of discussion.
And the long range plans submitted over the decades prove how wrong they can be. But think of how much money is made doing these long range plans – and that is why they will never stop doing them.
Planners gotta eat, too. So- they never envisioned Uber or self driving cars, to name two. That’s no reason not to double down on what they think should be done, is it? Especially when they’re spending Other People’s Money. [/sarc]
20-year plans ignore the fact that there are new mayors, commissioners, councilors, governors, senators, representatives, presidents and palms to be greased every 2-4-6 years.
How many of these MPOs are elected bodies? How many of them are like MInnesota’s Met Council that do far more than planning ( running sewer water, transit, etc ) ?