Telling Clients What They Want to Hear

The Washington State Transportation Commission hired the Boston Consulting Group to develop a “sustainable growth vision” for the Cascadia Corridor, which means Vancouver, BC to Portland, Oregon. The Boston Group did taxpayers a disservice by telling the commission what it wanted to hear, rather than what it needed to know.

The group observed that the cities in the corridor have the opportunity to become “a global innovation hub.” To find out how to do that, the Bostonians looked at other major innovation hubs and discovered they fall into two rather distinct groups that it called “affordable sprawl” and “expensive and congested.” The best representative of the former is the Texas Triangle, meaning Dallas-Houston-San Antonio. The best representative of the latter is the San Francisco Bay Area.

When measured on two axes of housing affordability and a rush-hour congestion, the Texas Triangle is high on affordability and low on congestion, while the Bay Area is low on affordability and high on congestion. The Bostonians noted that the Cascadia Corridor is currently right in the middle on both, but warned that if it wasn’t careful it would end up as bad or even worse off than the Bay Area.

So what policies did the Boston Group recommend?

• Visioning: “Planning, vision alignment, and
  mitigation actions from existing cities”;
• Selection and development of “high density hub cities connected by transit with robust industry clusters”;
• Densification within those cities to accommodate 1.3 million new people by “turning 325K single-family homes into multi-family dwellings”;
• Construction of high-speed transit between those cities;
• Integrate local transit in hub cities into the high-speed line.

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This is exactly the prescription the Northwest needs if it wants to become as congested and unaffordable as the San Francisco Bay Area. It is exactly the opposite of the prescription the Northwest needs if it wants to become as affordable and congestion-free as the Texas Triangle.

The Texas Triangle didn’t become the fastest-growing region in the country through the use of visioning, central determination of which cities should grow into hub cities, densification, and high-speed intercity transit. The San Francisco Bay Area successfully stifled its growth through visioning, central planning, densification, an emphasis on transit, and most recently construction of a failed high-speed rail line, all of which made the region one of the least affordable and most congested regions of the country.

I agree that Washington and other parts of the Cascade Corridor should aspire to follow the example of the Texas Triangle. That would mean:

• Repealing the state and provincial growth-management laws that have hindered urban development and made housing expensive;
• Allowing private developers to determine, in response to market forces, where development should take place;
• Allowing people to choose the kind of housing they want based on personal preferences and not on planners’ notions of how people ought to live;
• Building new road capacity where it is needed and not where central planners think it should go and funding those roads out of user fees so their location will be determined as much as possible by market forces;
• Forget about high-speed intercity transit unless some private investors are foolish enough to spend their own money on it.

Yes, people have proposed high-speed rail in the Texas Triangle, but the only proposals to get very far have been private and those proposals have had nothing to do with the region’s growth. Yes, Dallas and Houston have built light rail, but (along with San Francisco and Los Angeles) such rail construction reduced transit’s share of travel and commuting. Transit carries a half a percent of passenger travel in Dallas-Ft. Worth and two-thirds of a percent in Houston, so it clearly isn’t a star player in the regions’ success.

Though several members of the transportation commission have open minds, the Washington Department of Transportation is pro-transit, pro-high-speed rail, and pro-growth-management (meaning pro-densification). The Boston Consulting Group completely ignored the data and told the transportation commission what the department wanted commissioners to hear.