The Problem with Planning

(or how transportation constrains our cities)

The biggest problem for urban planners in America today is that they don’t control the transportation infrastructure. Cities often work in silos, where the planners write the rules for what can be built on private property, while the Public Works Department designs and builds the roads. Unfortunately, the roads we build directly affect the private land uses that are viable.

Often, the priorities and general world view of planners and traffic engineers are at odds with one another. While planners often want to build vibrant communities, traffic engineers want to move the highest volume of traffic possible. Chuck Marohn does a good job of describing this disconnect in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.

Traffic engineers have good reason to focus on moving high volumes of cars, a topic of many community meetings is the reduction in traffic and the need for more parking. On its face, these community concerns support the traffic engineer’s desire for wider and faster streets. But underneath the comments about traffic is a desire for residents to quickly and efficiently go about their lives. They don’t want to waste their time in traffic, but they also don’t necessarily care if they use their car to travel to whatever their destination might be. Reducing traffic by adding lanes and speeding up traffic is the most direct solution to the real concerns of the community, it certainly is not the only one. However, it is the only solution that destroys what makes a community worth living in.

Roads that are designed to move large volumes of cars at high speeds are disastrous for building vibrant communities. They engender places to drive through, not to travel to. Specifically, high speed, high volume roads are in no way walkable. The result is that the only viable buildings along such roads are served by cars. It is impossible to have successful, street facing retail on a fast, high volume street. It is impossible to get to know your neighbors on a street given over to cars.

Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle is a great example of this type of failure. It was conceived of as a new mixed-use community in the heart of Orange County. Unfortunately, it is bisected by two, ten-lane roads. All of the commercial uses were originally planned to face these roads. To date, very little of the planned commercial was ever built, and what was built is chronically vacant. Despite thousands of homes being built within walking distance, nobody walks here because the roads are not comfortable to walk along. It was a great planning effort that has failed because the planners didn’t have control of the roadway network.

The solution to this disconnect between planners and traffic engineers is a comprehensively planned city to ensure the road network supports the true desires of the community instead of working against them. This requires a city to have a vision and goals for its future, and for the traffic engineers to relinquish their personal priorities of moving high volumes of cars to the community’s priorities as expressed through the city’s vision and goals. It requires other solutions to mobility rather than the car. It requires bringing disparate uses closer together; to bring housing to the city’s retail centers and new retail near existing homes. It requires building transportation alternatives, including safe walking and cycling paths, to connect residents homes to their daily destinations such as schools, shopping, and work.

Unfortunately, finding traffic engineers that are willing to subordinate their professional engineering judgement to the desires of the community can be difficult. The entire traffic engineering profession is oriented towards moving cars quickly. Everything traffic engineers learn in school and all of their professional guidance teaches them is to move high volumes of cars and to reject anything that gets in the way of that mission.

This is where political leadership needs to come in, and where having a comprehensive plan for the city is necessary. In order to achieve the goals of the city, political leaders must reject roadway plans that hinder the realization of the vision of the city’s future. In fact, it takes political leadership to re-exert control of the development of our cities, away from traffic engineers and back to the community where it belongs.

The only way to ensure planners and traffic engineers are working together towards a common outcome for the city is to have a comprehensive plan that articulates a vision and goals for the city, and the political leadership to follow through on realizing that vision.