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The Pace-of-Change Problem

By | | Public lands, Why Planning Fails
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In 1976, when Congress required the Forest Service to write comprehensive, long-range plans for each of the 100 or so national forests, the Chief of the Forest Service estimated that it would take about three years to write all the plans. In fact, it took eighteen.

Part of the problem was that planning took so long that reality changed in unexpected ways before the plan could be completed. Planners then had a choice of ignoring reality or starting over. Those who ignored reality delivered plans to forest managers that made no sense. Those who started over never really got done.

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For Sale: Closet for $335,000

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning
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From London, the least-affordable housing market in the world, comes news that a 77-square-foot closet can be yours to live in for just $335,000 (plus an estimated $59,000 to clean it up and add such luxuries as electricity and heat).

Such high prices are the result of green belts and an anti-housing planning process. While this closet is in one of the wealthier parts of London, other recent real estate deals in England include:

Density Increases Congestion

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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In an earlier post, I mentioned that density increases congestion and was chastised for failing to prove it. So here is the evidence.

Start with data from the 2000 census that compares the percentage of commuters who drive to work with the population density of nearly 400 urbanized areas (areas with more than 50,000 people). If density reduced congestion, then increased densities would greatly reduce auto commuting.

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Eugene Bus-Rapid Transit Disaster Update

By | | Planning Disasters, Transportation
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In a previous post, I warned that the Eugene bus-rapid transit line may not live up to expectations. In particular, test runs indicated that it might go as fast as promised — an average 16-minute trip from downtown Springfield to downtown Eugene. Some people thought that it was just a matter of getting the bugs worked out.

The line has now been open for more than a week, and they still can’t meet the 16-minute schedule. Sometimes a bus has fallen so far behind its schedule that the transit agency has had to pull it from the line.

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Planning Makes World Housing Unaffordable

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Urban areas
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Urban planners have made housing unaffordable in places like San Jose and Portland. But planning has created affordability problems that are at least as serious in Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

That’s Wendell Cox’s conclusion in his third annual housing affordability survey, which looks at housing prices in 159 housing markets in the United States and British Commonwealth countries.

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Portland Tram “on Budget”

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters, Transportation
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The myth-making has already begun. The Oregonian reports today about Portland city employee Rob Bernard, which it describes as the man “most responsible for opening” Portland’s new aerial trams “on schedule and on budget.”

On what budget? As Jim Karlock documents, the tram went more than 500 percent over the original projected cost, and its operating costs are at least 250 percent over projections. I’d like to have a budget like that!

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Region-by-Region Review of Rail Transit

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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About twenty-five urban areas had rail transit in 2005. Transit systems in five of these lost market share to the automobile, they gained in eight, and in eleven they held their own (when measured to the nearest tenth of a percent). Data for the twenty-fifth, New Orleans, are not available.

“Holding their own” may sound good for transit systems in our auto-oriented society. But it is a disappointment when so much more has been promised for the expensive rail lines being built in so many cities. This is especially true when all but seven of these transit systems — rail and bus — carry under 2 percent of total passenger travel in the regions they serve.

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The Roger-Rabbit Myth and Why It Persists

By | | Transportation
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According to popular convention, General Motors and the oil industry bought up all the wonderful streetcars that used to efficiently move people around our cities and scrapped them, thereby forcing people to buy cars and become petroleum-dependent. If true, spending billions of dollars on rail transit merely restores the natural balance that was disrupted by monopolistic auto and oil companies.

In fact, this myth is totally bogus, and I am gratified to note that Googling general motors conspiracy actually produces more web sites debunking the myth than supporting it (at least on Google’s first page). Yet I still hear it raised time and again, so it is worth debunking one more time.

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More on Why Long-Range Planning Fails

By | | Planning Disasters, Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
25 Comments

Commenter Dan says that my previous post on problems with long-range planning used “outdated examples,” so let’s look at a current example of long-range planning. The Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) published its Metro Vision 2030, a long-range land-use plan for the Denver metro area, in 2005. That makes it a twenty-five year plan.

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