No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Engineers vs. Planners: Comparing Their Methods

Jan 9

2007

Jack Bogdanski was kind enough to link to this site, and one of his readers commented:

The Antiplanner doesn’t appear to be against just land-use planning… but rather ALL kinds of government planning. I’m baffled. Should government just proceed willy-nilly on whatever each bureaucrat’s personal whim is that day?”

In my opening post, I defined “government planning” as planning that is comprehensive, long-range, and/or deals with other people’s land and resources. This is the sort of planning that does not work.

I have no problem with government agencies that have narrowly defined missions doing the planning they need to do to carry out those missions. To distinguish this from “government planning” as defined above, I would call this mission-oriented planning organizing.

For example, compare the way state highway departments were run from about 1920 through 1980 or so with they way transportation departments are run today. For the first fifty or sixty years, highway departments were run by engineers, not planners. At least since 1991, most transportation planning has been done by planners, not engineers.

People view engineering today as a rather practical profession, but civil engineers in the early twentieth century were idealists inspired by the Progressive movement of scientific government. A discussion of Progressivism deserves its own full post, so let’s leave that aside for now. But it is important to understand that, as scientific managers, the engineers saw their job as one of maximizing the net social benefits of transportation by developing quantifiable measures of what they produced.

The engineers soon decided that their first priority was safety and their second priority was the efficient movement of people and goods, both of which could be easily quantified. Related to these two was the smoothness and quality of the road surfaces people traveled on, and these could also be quantified. The engineers judged their performance based on these measures.

Due to a lack of funds, highway construction made little progress for the first two decades of the twentieth century. But in 1919, the Oregon legislature adopted the idea (first used in England) of taxing gasoline and dedicating such “user fees” to highways. In little more than a decade, every other state imitated Oregon’s law, and by 1930 the vast majority of road costs came out of such user fees.

I don’t think the engineers planned it this way, but these user fees became a valuable feedback mechanism for the highway departments. Roads that generated little traffic produced few gas taxes. So highway departments would resist the efforts of a pork-barrelling legislator to build an expensive bridge to nowhere. Since the highways were largely self funding, legislators tended to leave the departments alone.

The engineers also systematically experimented with new techniques and reported on those experiments. Was parallel parking safer than diagonal parking? What was the best way of designing various sorts of intersections? When were one-way streets safer and more efficient than two way? Most of their studies counted numbers of accidents and traffic flows before and after installation of some new device. If the device–traffic lights, one-way streets, grooved pavement–offered significant advantages, it would be adopted by many highway departments (though most would conduct their own experiments to confirm the results).

The results turned out to be almost uniformly positive. People got roads where they needed them. The departments got the funding for building and maintaining the roads. The engineers monitored the roads and expanded them where they found congestion, adding safety measures where they found hazards.

“The inclination of the engineers to whom road-planning is largely entrusted has been to define and apply appropriate standards in transportation terms,” observed University of Michigan economist Shorey Peterson in 1950. “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.”

Attempting to account for some nebulous “public interest,” Peterson warned, would lead to “the wildest and most irreconcilable differences of opinion.” Without specific, quantifiable benchmarks, no one could say for sure where road should go. “Controlled in this way, highway projects are peculiarly subject to ‘pork barrel’ political grabbing.”

The downfall of the engineers began in the late 1960s and 1970s when inflation drove up construction costs but not gas tax revenues. Although urban freeways also became controversial at this time, as UCLA planning Professor Brian Taylor observed in Access magazine (4.2 mb pdf), it was really inflation that shut down urban roadbuilding programs.

The resulting congestion fed arguments that “you can’t build your way out of congestion” and “new roads simply induce more traffic.” Planners used these arguments along with the urban freeway controversies to persuade Congress to turn transportation planning power over to them rather than the engineers. Congress did so in 1991.

Instead of setting concrete goals such as safety and the efficient movement of traffic, planners set nebulous goals such as urban livability and downtown revitalization. Instead of using quantitative measures such as fatalities per billion passenger miles and passenger miles per hour per lane mile, planners focused on qualitative things like people’s sense of community, neighborhood stability, and aesthetics.

The results have been exactly as Shorey Peterson predicted. Transportation plans today are based more on political power than on scientific management.

The engineers provided an example of how government agencies can plan or organize their activities. To be successful, such plans should focus on a narrow mission, use quantifiable measures, and receive feedback from some form of user fees. if any of these three things are absent, the government plan will fail.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner