Choices & Tradeoffs

Urban planning is a series of choices and tradeoffs. Understanding these tradeoffs is critical when planning for a city’s future. Too often, residents advocate for, and city decision makers pursue, a course of action without fully understanding all of the foreseeable ramifications of that course of action. Planners must make a concerted effort to communicate all of the impacts, and help decision makers understand the tradeoffs inherent in their decisions.

The most common and relatable example of residents advocating for a course of action with foreseeable but unexamined consequences is traffic reduction. In community meetings and city halls across the country, residents raise concerns about traffic and want to see increased roadway capacity to reduce traffic congestion. 

There are two ways to increase roadway capacity, either increase the number of lanes or increase the speed of the existing lanes. Both of these strategies create foreseeable negative impacts, including streets that are less walkable, less neighborly, less safe, more damaging to the environment, and harmful to neighborhood businesses. However, these secondary impacts of increasing roadway capacity are rarely considered until they start to be felt in the community, and by then it’s often too late to reverse the impact.

When policies and projects are considered at city hall, the direct impacts are often examined. Most city council staff reports will have a section related to the impact on the city’s budget (but they only examine direct costs), and there will often be an environmental study that analyzes how a project or policy will directly impact the environment. However, the analysis stops at those direct sorts of impacts. 

Policies and projects should be analyzed not just on these direct impacts, but on the knowable secondary impacts as well. This is not to say that all secondary impacts are knowable, but many are and should be looked at when they’re known. This analysis of secondary impacts should tie back to the city’s goals and vision for how it wants to develop. 

While each and every policy and project should support the city’s overarching vision, sometimes projects will support one goal while harming another. Too often, the goal the project supports will be mentioned, but the goal the project harms will remain absent. It is these types of tradeoffs that need to be raised and considered. It might be that the goal the project supports is more important, or that the benefit to one goal outweighs the harm to the other goal.

Decision makers cannot make well informed decisions if they don’t fully understand the choices they’re making, and the tradeoffs they entail. It is incumbent on planners to help decision makers fully understand the tradeoffs inherent in the decisions they make. This is the only way to create cities that are livable with intention.