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Strong Towns Rebuttal

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
8 Comments

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.

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Antiplanner Rebuttal

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
7 Comments

Charles, you agree with me that most of the long-range transportation plans written by states and metropolitan areas are “dismal.” But you imagine that planning is necessary for all sorts of reasons — efficiency, meeting national priorities, measuring results, and promoting innovations. Just because you think those are necessary goals, you insist that we must plan.

I submit to you that no long-range plan has ever met any of those goals, nor will one ever do so because they are impossible to meet over the long run. Efficiencies? When we don’t know what the future will bring or what people will want, we can’t imagine what will be efficient. Priorities? How can people today dictate priorities for the future, and how can Congress — where “all politics is local” — set national priorities anyway? Measuring results? When have government agencies ever bothered to follow up to see if their plans produced the results they claimed? And, by their tedious and time-consuming nature, long-range plans are much more likely to stifle innovations than promote them.

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Where Do We Want to Go?

By | | Transportation
14 Comments

Note: This is Charles Marohn’s argument in favor of federally mandated transportation planning.

“Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get,” said the Cat.
“I really don’t care where,” replied Alice.
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

The Federal government spends tens of billions of dollars annually on transportation infrastructure. Are we getting our money’s worth? Are we maximizing our return? Are we building on our assets to create a strong, competitive nation? Are we accomplishing anything productive?

These are critical questions. The only way we know the answers is to set objectives, coordinate actions and measure results. In a word: plan.

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Federal Funding & Transportation Planning

By | | Regional planning, Transportation, Why Planning Fails
6 Comments

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.

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