Note: This is the second of a series of interblog debates between the Antiplanner and Charles Marohn of the Strong Towns Blog.
Should Congress require cities and states to do transportation planning in order to be eligible for federal transportation funds? Under current law, states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are required to do two kinds of plans: long-range transportation plans that look ahead for about 20 years, and transportation-improvement plans (TIPs) that focus on projects that are going to be funded or partly funded in the next year or two.
The Antiplanner has always believed that short-term, mission-specific planning is a necessary part of any program or activity. We plan our days, school teachers plan their lessons, and highway departments plan road maintenance and bridge construction. So I don’t have a lot of objections to TIPs, though I think the legal requirement is unnecessary — it’s going to happen whether the law requires it or not.
But the Antiplanner has always objected to long-range planning. Two years ago, I sat down and read more than 70 long-range metropolitan transportation plans (and if you don’t think that was painful, try it sometime). I found that they all failed to do a good job of setting goals, developing alternative ways of meeting those goals, and fairly evaluating those alternatives.
Heck, most of them didn’t consider any alternatives at all. One of the few that considered anything more than a “do nothing” alternative was later proven to have cooked the books to make the planners’ preconceived ideas appear to make sense. Yet taxpayers are spending something like $1 billion a year to produce these mountains of garbage, which Congress requires be revised every five years.
This law should be called the Urban Planners’ Full-Employment Act. Except for jobs for planners, it is producing nothing of value and much harm. Wait a minute, scratch that part about “except for jobs for planners.”
But, you may say, the mere fact that all the long-range transportation plans I’ve reviewed have been junk doesn’t prove that there is something wrong with the idea of long-range transportation planning. If only the plans were done right, they would be very useful, right?
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Wrong. There are two fundamental flaws to the very idea of long-range planning. First, no one knows what the world will be like in 20 years. Twenty years ago, hardly anyone had heard of the internet, the World Wide Web didn’t exist, and on-line ordering of everything from groceries to log homes seemed as distant a dream as driverless cars. Since we can’t know the future, too many planners plan for the past, which is one reason why we see so many cities wanting to build streetcars and other totally obsolete forms of transportation.
Anyone who thinks about the future — which means just about everyone — has to deal with uncertainty. Most of us try to be flexible: if the situation changes, we change our plans. But governments have a hard time being flexible because as soon as they write a plan, special-interest groups that benefit from that plan begin to conspire to keep the plan going even if it turns out to be a disaster. Since the benefits are concentrated and the costs shared among many, those interest groups usually prevail.
As a result, long-range plans lead states and metro areas into disaster because, once a plan that is certain to be wrong is written, they can’t change it. For example (as I previously detailed), Sacramento’s 2006 transportation plan admitted (on page 3) that the plans written “during the past 25 years have not worked out.” So what did the new plan propose? More of the same.
But if such plans are so bad, why does Congress require them? The ostensible reason for requiring such plans is that Congress wants to insure that taxpayer money is being effectively spent. But we can do a better job of that by providing state and local agencies with incentives to spend the money properly. For example, if transportation is about mobility, as the Antiplanner believes, then funds can be distributed according to how much mobility each state achieves. This will give states incentives to invest their shares of funds on things that most enhance mobility.
Another reason for the planning requirement was given by former NRDC lawyer and current law professor David Schoenbrod in his 1995 book, Power Without Responsibility. Rather than make the hard decisions itself, observed Schoenbrod, Congress would delegate responsibility to planners (or other bureaucrats) and let them take the heat for the resulting disasters.
Another answer is that the negative effects of long-range plans are so insidious that few know to blame them on the plans. Congestion has quintupled in the past 25 years, so we need a new plan! When in fact, in many places, the congestion has quintupled (or worse) because of, not in spite of, past plans.
Long-range transportation planning does not work and cannot work. Instead of requiring such planning, Congress should do taxpayers and travelers a favor and forbid it. At the very least, all planning requirements should be eliminated from transportation laws.
One problem with long range planning is that we believe what we learn from history. By that, I mean when we study history in college, we learn history by seeing long-term trends that influenced the future. If we think about it, we may wonder why the smart people of the past didn’t see the trends or why they chased different trends that turned out to be dead ends (monarchies, communism, eugenics, etc.).
When we try long-term planning, we think we can spot the long term trends of our time. The problem is that the long term trends are not clear in the present time. It is not even a matter of being smart enough. Just one example is that all the smart people saw computers as important to science and mathematics, yet no one foresaw the immense social aspects of computers.
So, when we try to make long term plans, we end up projecting our own biases as long term trends and plan the future accordingly. Is the future of transportation cars, trains, subways, light rail, bicycles, moving sidewalks, or Segways? Where you end up usually depends on where you stand now.
Another related problem of long term planning is the myth that a long term vision avoids the data noise of the short term, and thus long term planning can be more accurate than long term planning. That would be true if you accurately spot the long term trends. But the strong tendency is for the long term projection to be far more inaccurate than short term projections. There is also a tendency to think you can ignore short term data that suggests you are wrong because you think you know the long term trend.
One example: I have read arguments that telecommuting will be a big trend in the future and have important implications for transportation. I can’t
Just a quick note recounting something I read–
The most society-changing technological innovations of the past decade were Wikipedia, the iPod, Facebook, and YouTube. None of them existed in 2000. Therefore, even the best predictive punditry from the year 2000, however plausible on its face, was at best able to name the fifth-most-important item, which was probably the ubiquity of broadband. (And that’s if we’re being charitable and crediting the best possible prediction based on then-known information.)
Knowing this, the very concept of long-term planning should be approached with skepticism, and should be limited to those things that the government and only the government must provide: military, police, and court system, along with associated subfunctions. Whatever happens with technology, those things will still be necessary.
Heck, not to go all sci-fi on the subject, but if teleportation were ever perfected, all those glorious state-funded transportation projects are going to be reduced to little more than oversized sculpture.
“…along with associated subfunctions.”
That’s a pretty big grey area, and who gets to decide where the line is actually drawn? Or better yet, where would you draw the line?
Extrapolating from the last 100 years I predict personal automated transport will continue to increase in market share. In the past it has been aircraft autopilots, elevators, spacecraft, and peoplemovers. Now it is personal rapid transit and automobiles. The future will be Evacuated Tube Transportâ„¢.
Some things take a long time – 40 years to grow a timber crop; more than a decade for planning for the optimal planetary alignments and trajectories, building equipment, launching space probes, travelling to distant planets, collecting, transmitting and analyzing data. If your project will take decades to complete don’t you need to plan decades in the future? And if your nuclear powerplant will create waste that will be hazardous for thousands of years don’t you need to plan for that?
bennett,
The area isn’t gray at all, but black and white. If it’s a function that is necessary to protect individual life, liberty, and property, requiring the government to utilize its exclusive sanction on the initiation of force, then it is a proper subfunction of the government and not appropriate for privatization.
For example, interstate highways would be a subfunction of the military. Regional epidemiology and disaster management, the military. Local epidemiology and disaster management, the police. Land title recording and vital records, the court system.
To illustrate one of those examples: It is necessary to protect property by ensuring that title to that property is unambiguously vested in its rightful owner. Competing private title recorders would give rise to the possibility of irreconcilable disputed claims to a parcel. While the government can and does make mistakes, the use of government force to exclude competing recorders creates a public record of ownership of reference of last resort. If it is incorrect, parties may recourse to the court system to have it fixed — but once uncontested and in repose, title is more secure here than anywhere else.
Land title recording as a subfunction of the court system, in fact, is one of the things we’re doing RIGHT. This was one of the most critical underlying causes of early American prosperity. Entrepreneurship, investment, and development flourished in a nation where there would be no remote scion of some ancient claimant to a former earldom or duchy or baronetcy coming out of the woodwork to attempt to seize possession of the property of a company or private citizen. In a very real sense, we’ve been riding the cash cow of title security for over two centuries.
Stop federal expenditures for states. It’s basically just returning tax revenue. Let each state raise money & decide how to spend. There will be more responsible, discretion & cost-consciousness.
Remember? “All politics is local.”