No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Many of things written in this blog in 2007 are mere echoes of statements made by Melvin Webber thirty to forty years ago. Webber, who died last November, was a professor of city planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

The latest issue of Access magazine, which Webber founded fifteen years ago, is a tribute to Webber, with articles by Martin Wachs, Robert Cervero, Peter Hall, Jonathan Richmond, and other researchers who are themselves legendary in the urban and transportation planning fields.

In these tributes, the adjective most often used to describe Webber is “skeptical.” “Mel’s deep skepticism was almost a charicature,” says Wachs. “He had the audacity to ask, over and over again, whether our most widely held beliefs could actually be supported by evidence.”

“I contend that we have been searching for the wrong grail, that the values associated with the desired urban structure do not reside in the spatial structure per se,” Webber wrote back in 1963. Modern communications and transportation technology rendered most planners’ idea of what a city should look like obsolete.

The title of the article was Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity, and Webber’s lesson was that those who say we need certain kinds of urban designs to promote community are wrong.

Ten years later, Webber joined with another writer to criticize the theory of planning. Planning problems “are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution,” they said in Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Webber called these problems “wicked” because they are not just hard to solve, they cannot in fact ever be solved: “only re-solved — over and over again.”

In 1976, Webber took a close look at the then-new BART system. “Having spent $1.6 billion to avert the trend to the auto-highway system, BART is now serving a mere two per cent of all trips made within the three-county district,” Webber wrote (a number that has not significantly increased since then). BART was “extraordinarily costly,” going 50 percent over budget in its construction costs and 375 percent over budget in its operating costs.

“If BART has achieved any sort of unquestionable success, it is as a public relations enterprise,” Webber continued. “BART has projected a superb image from the start: a high-speed, futuristic transport mode that would transport commuters in luxurious comfort without economic pain.” Unfortunately, Webber presciently doubted that leaders in other urban areas would learn anything about BART except this illusion. As a result, Webber predicted, BART was likely to “become the first of a series of multi-billion-dollar mistakes scattered from one end of the continent to the other.”

This sort of skepticism guided Webber throughout his career. As noted in the BART paper, Webber believed that transit agencies should compete against the auto not by using expensive, nineteenth-century technologies but by providing low-cost bus services “that more nearly approximate the door-to-door, no-transfer, flexible-routing features of the private car.”

Webber was an unabashed supporter, if not an enthusiast, of autos and sprawl. “Autos are popular because the auto-highway system is the best ground transportation system yet devised,” said a 1992 paper on The Joys of Automobility. Sprawling “cities are proving to be highly successful, and they seem to be the form of the future metropolis everywhere,” he wrote in The Joys of Spread City in 1998.

Webber was also skeptical of plans that tried to lock up every available acre of open space. “The task is not to ‘protect our natural heritage of open space’ just because it is natural, or a heritage, or open, or because we see ourselves as Galahads defending the good form against the evils of urban sprawl,” he wrote in the propinquity paper. “This is a mission of evangelists, not planners.”

Webber would almost be enough to restore my faith in planners. However, he himself was not educated as a planner; his training was in economics and sociology. As I’ve noted before, most planning schools (including the one at UC Berkeley) are associated with architecture schools. So the graduates of these schools end up focusing on urban design and aesthetics. Too few end up with Webber’s skepticism.

If you Access magazine in hard copy format, you can get a free subscription and/or order back issues at no charge.

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The Skeptical Planning Professor

May 16

2007

Reprinted from The Antiplanner