HomeMy WebLinkAboutarticle planning vs chaos26. Planning vs. Chaos
In the July 2005 issue of Trains magazine, columnist Don Phillips
applauded the European Union for writing a plan to take freight
traffic off highways and put it on rails. A newcomer to Europe,
Phillips considered this a good thing because—most Trains readers
fervently believe—trains are supposed to be more environmentally
sound than trucks. "Europe is trying to be a planned economy as
far as transportation is concerned," said Phillips approvingly, while
"the U.S. continues to be a crisis economy."'
Regardless of the merits of trains versus trucks, Phillips should
have looked at the numbers before promoting European -style central
planning. Although Europe has punitively taxed truckers and subsi-
dized rail for decades, the European Union admits that 75 percent
of European freight moves by truck.' This compares with just 28
percent in the United States.' Moreover, since 1980, the share of
European freight that is shipped by rail declined from 22 percent
to 14 percent; during the same period, the share of U.S. freight
shipped by rail increased from 31 percent to 39 percent.
Phillips made the common mistake of judging planners by their
intentions rather than their performance. As a former Washington
Post writer, he has an inside -the -Beltway view of U.S. transportation,
which is why he sees it as lurching from crisis to crisis. In fact, when
Congress deregulated the rail and trucking industries in 1980, it
placed power in the hands of individual entrepreneurs and busi-
nesses, not central planners. This reduced transportation costs and
freed the railroads to capture much shipping that would otherwise
be on the highway. Similarly, after Britain privatized and deregu-
lated its railways, British rails enjoyed the fastest growth in freight
tonnage in Europe.
After spending a year in Europe, Phillips realized his mistake. "I
now believe that private enterprise does a far better job of running
a freight railroad," he wrote. "No matter how much the European
Union pushes European railroads to take freight off the highway,
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the current system simply cannot hold a candle to what the U.S.
system does now every day."' Yet, he indicated, he still believes
that the government should run passenger trains even though gov-
ernment -run passenger trains have been losing market share in
Europe at about the same rate as their freight counterparts.
Railroads are supposed to be the white knights today because
they can be more energy efficient than cars and trucks. But in the
late 19th century, railroads were considered villains because they
acted as monopolies in many parts of the country. Between 1887
and 1907, Congress passed several laws that took from the railroads
the power to set rates and make other day-to-day decisions and
gave that power to planners in the Interstate Commerce Commission
in Washington. This stifled the railroads' ability to compete against
truckers and waterways, and it was not until the 1980 deregulation
and subsequent closure of the Interstate Commerce Commission—
a rare example of a federal agency shutting its doors—that railroads
were able to gain back traffic from the trucks.
In the 19th century, many of the nation's highways had been
privately built as toll roads. But because railroad monopolies had
given private transportation a bad name, when people started pro-
moting highways for 20th -century automobiles, they decided that
government should build the roads. In 1919, Oregon became the
first state to charge motorists a gasoline tax and dedicate that tax
to highways and streets.' By 1932, when Congress dedicated the
first federal gas tax to roads, every other state had followed Oregon's
example and nearly 60 percent of the money spent on roads came
from such taxes.' Since that time, user fees including tolls and weight -
per -mile truck fees have covered an average of 88 percent of all
highway construction, maintenance, and operating costs.'
Until recently, civil engineers made most of the decisions about
how to spend this money. The engineers' first priority was safety,
and their second priority was the efficient movement of goods and
people. In the 1980s and 1990s, urban planners successfully wrested
control of transportation planning from the engineers. The sad result
is that transportation now costs far more and does far less than it
used to do, and in many respects it is more dangerous.
Although planners pay lip service to congestion reduction and
use people's dislike of congestion to gain power, their actual plans
show that they have a very different agenda from the engineers.
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Instead of improving safety and relieving congestion, planners seek
to reduce safety and increase congestion to discourage people from
driving. Instead of spending scarce transportation funds as effec-
tively as possible, planners divert funds from cost-effective programs
and spend them on expensive urban monuments such as light-
rail transit.
Planners gladly joined an informal congestion coalition of interest
groups that benefit from increased traffic delays. This coalition
includes transit agencies, rail contractors, downtown property own-
ers, and anti -auto environment groups. Any cities or urban areas
that rely on urban planners to do or coordinate their transportation
planning are likely to find that the resulting plans create far more
problems than they solve. Real solutions will be found to America's
congestion problems only when transportation decisions are
returned to engineers responding to user fees and other signals
about what people really need and want from their transportation
investments.
It is useful to compare the methods of the engineers with those
of the planners. With a narrow focus on safety and efficiency, the
engineers carefully studied the effects of any changes or improve-
ments they made to see if those effects were good or bad, and they
published their results for other engineers to see. Practical Traffic
Engineering for Small Communities, published in 1958 by Pennsylvania
State University, offers numerous examples of the engineers'
method.' The guide presents hundreds of case studies asking such
questions as
• Will traffic signals reduce pedestrian accidents?
• Is parallel parking less prone to accident than angle parking?
• Will putting grooves in pavement reduce accidents?
Notice the heavy emphasis on reducing accidents, in keeping with
the engineers' first priority of safety. Improving traffic flows and
reducing congestion are important, of course, but only if they can
be done without reducing—and preferably by increasing—safety.
Most of the studies described in the 1958 engineering manual
followed a common method. Data were gathered for a year or
more. Then some action—installing a traffic signal, grooving pave-
ment, and so forth—was taken and, sometimes after an adjustment
period, data were gathered again. The two periods were compared.
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Instead of a before -and -after comparison, engineers sometimes
compared two similar streets—say, one with parallel parking and
one with angle parking. Sometimes a control street was used for
comparison, or perhaps the city as a whole. For example, accidents
on a particular street might decline after the pavement was grooved
even though accidents increased in the city as a whole. In any case,
the point was to carefully evaluate whether the action produced
positive benefits and perhaps to assess whether they were worth
the cost.
Over time, engineers developed methods to rank roads based on
at least three different considerations: safety, pavement quality, and
congestion. For example, congestion was ranked with a letter grade,
A through F. Roads rated A had very little traffic, while F represented
stop -and -go traffic. After fixing safety problems and maintaining
pavement quality, engineers gave priority to relieving congestion
on the roads rated F, E, and, where funding was available, D.
One of the advantages of this system was that it came with a
feedback relationship. If state highway departments built highways
that people used, those people would buy more gasoline to drive
on the highways and thus provide more funding to the departments.
Even though the departments were a part of government, this feed-
back relationship made them act something like private businesses.
While politics played a role in highway location, the departments
would tend to resist a "highway to nowhere" that might cost them
a large share of their budget but yield little gas tax revenue.
"Highway expenditures can be guided on a more precise basis"
than the expenses of most government programs, noted University
of Michigan economist Shorey Peterson in 1950. "The inclination of
the engineers to whom road -planning is largely entrusted has been
to define and apply appropriate standards in transportation terms.
It is in the character for the engineer to be mainly concerned, not
with broad matters of public interest, but with specific relations
between road types and traffic conditions."'
Peterson specifically warned against trying to account for the
"public interest" when planning roads. This would lead to "the
wildest and most irreconcilable differences of opinion," he said.
"Control of road improvements through judging its relation to the
general welfare is as debatable, as devoid of dependable bench-
marks, as deciding the proper peacetime expenditure for national
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defense or the right quantity and quality of public education," said
Peterson. "Controlled in this way, highway projects are peculiarly
subject to 'pork barrel' political grabbing."10
Accounting for the public interest and broader considerations than
just transportation is exactly what planners promise to do. Planners
observed that new highways actually generated traffic because they
led to new development along the road. In this way, the planners
said, the highway engineers were actually influencing land use and,
as such, highway decisions should take into account more factors
than just safety, pavement quality, and congestion. The planners
offered themselves as experts in "comprehensive land -use planning"
who could do a better job of transportation planning than the
engineers.
To gain power, planners allied themselves with opponents of the
automobile. The tradition of auto hating goes back at least to the
1968 publication of Road to Ruin by A. Q. Mowbry, who claimed
that "highway advocates are already laying plans for an accelerated
effort to blanket the nation with asphalt."" In 1968, auto critics had
some legitimate points: automobile accidents killed nearly 55,000
people per year, and auto pollution obscured skylines and clogged
people's lungs in most of our larger cities.
Those problems have been significantly reduced, partly due to
improvements in highway construction and other technologies and
partly due to congressional legislation mandating safer and cleaner
cars. Auto opponents ignore these gains, often claiming that air
quality is getting worse when it is getting better or arguing that
freeways create dangerous conditions when, by attracting cars away
from local streets, they make cities safer. They also add in all sorts
of other spurious costs of driving, such as the Iraq War or the cost
of making cell phone calls from your car.12
"Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains respon-
sible for the ills of cities," observed Jane Jacobs. 'But the destructive
effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our
incompetence at city building." Planners "do not know what to do
with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for
workable and vital cities anyhow—with or without automobiles."13
Despite Jacobs's warning, many planners happily used anti -auto
arguments to promote the idea that they, rather than the engineers,
should plan state and regional transport systems. Finally, in 1991,
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Congress required all states and urban areas to undertake compre-
hensive transportation planning in order to qualify for federal trans-
portation funds.14 Planners were right in saying that transportation
improvements influenced land use, and comprehensive planning
might not have been bad if anyone had been capable of doing it.
But no one was, and particularly not planners. Instead, planners
turned their newly gained power into an anti -automobile crusade.
In doing so, planners turned the engineers' priorities almost
completely upside down. Instead of trying to prevent traffic from
reaching E or F levels of congestion, they sought to create such
congestion. Instead of trying to increase safety, they consciously
adopted plans that made roads more dangerous. They hoped that
more congested and more dangerous roads would discourage peo-
ple from driving, yet they lacked any evidence that this was so.
Although automobiles provided nearly 90 percent of passenger
transport in this country, auto users were not organized to stop the
planners. But planners went out of their way to gain the support of
well -organized auto haters.
As Peterson predicted, a major consequence of transferring
transportation planning from the engineers to the planners is that
transportation decisions have become highly politicized. While the
engineers based their decisions on quantifiable criteria—safety, effi-
ciency, speed, pavement quality—the criteria used by urban plan-
ners were vague and fluid: pedestrian friendly, transit oriented,
anti -sprawl. This made them subject to manipulation by special
interest groups and politicians interested more in pork barrel than
in transportation. Before 1980, for example, Congress was content
to let the states decide where to spend federal highway money. But
Congress included 10 earmarks, or directions that specific projects
be funded, in the 1982 transportation bill. Since then, the number
of earmarks has steadily increased to more than 6,000 in the 2005
bill. These earmarks severely tie the hands of any states that are
truly interested in improving the safety and efficiency of their trans-
portation systems.
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