I want to begin my rebuttal by expressing my condolences to the Antiplanner, Randal O’Toole, for the pain and suffering he endured reading more than seventy metropolitan transportation plans. It is quite a price to pay for insight. I am happy he survived the ordeal, although it seems Mr. O’Toole may now be suffering from an intellectual form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that has biased him against planning. I’m gently teasing, but let me offer some “treatment.”
I don’t know what will happen on my way home from work today. I may be killed in a car accident. I may stop and help a woman deliver a baby on the side of the road. Or I may stop and buy milk before heading home. Using Antiplanner logic, I should not bother to call home to see if anything is needed at the grocery because I am not sure I’ll even make it home. In contrast, Strong Towns would argue that I should buy life insurance and carry a cell phone for the first two possibilities, but should assume I will make it home for dinner.
To be fair, O’Toole has indicated that he is not opposed to short-term planning. But short-term planning is an oxymoron commonly known as “reacting.†The fact that we don’t know what will happen in twenty years is the exact reason we should plan.
We agree that the current state of public planning is dismal. I fully believe Mr. O’Toole when he says the plans he read did not do a good job of evaluating alternatives. That is our experience as well. This means we need to reform our approach to planning, not choose simply to stumble blindly to our future.
The special interests that O’Toole laments are a function of the way we plan. The standard approach lines up all of these interests and then seeks to appease each. The result is generally a perpetuation of the status quo (largely, more auto-based infrastructure) with the occasional “innovation,†like a rail line through a low-density suburb. Neither one is an accurate response to market signals.
The solution is to open up the planning process, make federal projects more “national†in nature and give local governments more flexibility and responsibility for the financial ramifications of their transportation choices. Some interesting examples:
- New Urbanist Planner and Architect Andres Duany has
proposed a method of soliciting public input using the jury pool to create a random sample of the population, providing a “community voice†that is given equal standing next to special interests. - Republican Newt Gingrich
has argued that the federal government should get away from local projects and focus on “mega-projects†instead, such as regional high-speed rail connections. - Robert Puentes of Brookings
has suggested methods to fund transportation that would more accurately reflect market preferences, such as replacing the gas tax with a mileage tax.
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Long-range transportation planning has an important function in building a strong America. We should do it better, not abandon it altogether.
As a final thought, but not an afterthought, I again want to express my gratitude to Randal O’Toole, the Antiplanner, for the opportunity to debate on this topic.
Charlie, this is Gwen Ifill and I’ll be moderating this debate and giving you some of my feedback. So far…
I’m seeing some pretty good sophistry out there, Chuck–although Randal’s aim has been to point out the foolishness of LONG-term planning: plans ranging from decades up to a century. You go on relate this with a failure to execute IMMEDIATE-term planning (not calling to buy milk). If that were what Randal was arguing, you would be right. Since it’s not, it’s an invalid comparison, and does more to help Randal than it does to help you.
That argument can’t feel like a victory. Anyway, not a strong lead-off; should have been buried a few paragraphs deep if you really felt like you HAD to get it in there. Don’t get discouraged, Chaz–You’ll get ’em on the next one!
@ Gwen – A bad analogy perhaps. An easily rectifiable mistake.
Why save for retirement or make any post-career plans when you don’t know what the future will be like? Why save for your child’s college education? Who knows if he will go on to university?
Why would someone in 1980 plan for explosive growth in Southern California or Atlanta? Why start buying up freeway rights-of-way? We can just wait to see where people move (pretending that it’s going to be a surprise) then knock down their houses so their neighbors can get to work. Why start planning water infrastructure when you can offer people the service after they move there? Why plan 15 years out when you can pay more money to do it last minute?
This is the most absurd anti-planning argument i’ve heard yet.
I have worked with Florida’s comprehensive planning process since its inception in the mid 80’s and question whether it has ever come close to achieving its lofty goal of making for a better living environment through long term planning. There are two fundamental problems that the long range planning process fails to take into account (or possibly cannot take into account) and that is politics and the market. In theory professional planning can lead to an efficient allocation of resources which results in a positive sum return for society. In reality, professional planning too many times is shunted aside for political expediency. In short, too many times what passes as planning is determined by those that have theirs and do not want it changed. Planning by majority rule does not make for good planning. In addition, planners have no more insight into market forces than anyone else; yet long range plans attempt to account for market forces without having the expertise to do so.
In general, the problem with long range plans is that they depend too much on the concept that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. My experience is just the opposite. Individual parts, like a water and sewer master plan, can work. But I have yet to see a comprehensive plan made up of many parts lead to good planning. If you consider the number of variables associated with a comprehensive plan and the inability to control the variables in any meaningful fashion, it is easy to see why most long range plans have little positive impact on future development.
It is not clear to me why planning for the evening would be valid yet planning for the next decade would not be. How does that thought process work? I don’t really know what is going to happen in either case. In the near-term one I am more sure, but then my plans are more concrete. Longer term I am less sure, but then again my plans have more flexibility and ambiguity.
In both cases I am better off setting a goal – picking a destination and then striking out in that direction. I may have to change course or adopt new approaches along the way, but at least I am prepared for that and not forced to simply react.
You can’t legitimately argue that there is good reason to plan for tomorrow but not for next week, next year or next decade.
It is not clear to me why planning for the evening would be valid yet planning for the next decade would not be. How does that thought process work?
It doesn’t work and that’s why this ideology only commands a handful of %age in the electorate and has almost no power, either intellectually or politically. Sorting thru the chaff yields an occasional grain, but the talking points in the polity don’t get far. They must be modified to gain ground.
DS
solibs et al. — you didn’t “rectify” the situation. You went medium-term–still not long-term–then you STILL focused on one person or one family (planning for college etc.). Stop focusing on one person or one small group, and stop focusing on short- and mid-term plans.
If you want to make all things equal, make sure to compare plans that are coercive; deal with millions–perhaps billions–of people, present and future, born and unborn, transient and permanent, in every different trade; with little or no knowledge of future technological advancements such as transportation mode share; occur over several decades or a century, etc.
The complexities involved in planning one’s own life over the short-term can be overwhelming; to think that one agency or one institution can or should be in charge of the quadrillions of complexities inherent to planning the lives of millions or billions of other people over the long-term is arrogance at its most malevolent.
That said, I’ll wait on the (1) ad absurdum extremes, like that declining draconian long-term plans necessarily requires hundreds of eminent domain claims per day; and (2) more non-sequitur comparisons.
Look–us docile, apple-bobbing rubes out here know you don’t trust us to plan our own lives, and that you would like to wrest control from us so we can live according to the plans of you and a few of your favorite technocrats. It’s just that we trust you less than you trust us.
I think a lot of Antiplanner’s rebuttal is accurate. Master planning in general has been met with decreasing success over its history. Historically, large scale visions of cities and their function could be drafted and enacted without recourse or hesitation to create completed, coordinated visions (Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York City.) Cities were a fraction of their present size with concentrated sources of leadership/government and funding/wealth. The Empire State Building was constructed in 19 months. The Highline in New York, 13 miles of raised track through the city, was funded and built in under 5 years–a feat impossible in amidst today’s red tape.
The 60’s and 70’s are the hallmark of massive urban plans and consistent was their ‘anti’climactic nature. Simply, they were never completed. Not only did the world and its priorities change too fast (as Mr. O’Toole touches on), but the plans were too rigid. Without any flexibility their goals could never shift and compromise, making their realization obsolete. This phenomenon haunts us today and casts a shadow over planning efforts and methods.
But that doesn’t mean that long-term planning is useless or unnecessary. If all we did was plan for the present then how are we ever going to meaningfully change? We should be building for what we want to be, not what we are. The key is that a new breed of planning has to emerge that accounts for flexibility and growth overtime. That factors the unknown to leave room for options and re-evaluation over time.
No, it’s not impossible. Read the work of James Corner, the lead at planning firm Field Operations, who talks about a mode of responsive planning and design.
The analogy in the opening post is ridiculous & not applicable.
The basic premise is somewhat along the lines of future patterns & behaviors & land uses are not known, so it is inappropriate to push them into certain ways.
The analogy is based upon a catastrophic accident happening in a 2 hour period. Driving home is a normal occurrence, almost every day. That has no comparison with future jobs, habits, etc.
The statists often use analogies which are faulty comparisons.