Planning for the Future
Yesterday I found myself reading with interests about the Chinese government’s plans for expansion of the Shanghai Metro. Very sensibly, there’s not only an ongoing expansion plan designed to last through 2020, but there’s also an even longer-range plan looking forward to 2050. This seems like the right way to do it—everyone expects Shanghai to continue growing throughout this period, so it’s only sensible to operate with a long-run plan in mind. A plan that’s subject to revision, to be sure, but that can guide current decision-making and ensure that there’s always some more projects ready to come online if the resources become available.
What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city. After all, the system is currently near its capacity for moving people, and the lack of any redundancy is already hurting us badly whenever any kind of problems arise.
Of course with plans in place the question would still arise of whether or not it’s possible to find the funds necessary to execute the construction of a new core-serving line. But my point would be that first things should come first, and you should always have plans in place so that you can be prepared to make the case for funding and think logically about the design of the metro area and the role transit can play. Instead, though, when we finish building something we tend to just . . . finish . . . as if further population growth somehow took us by surprise.
23 Responses to “Planning for the Future”
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August 10th, 2009 at 11:36 am
There is no real mystery here: in the post-WWII (and particularly post-Civil Rights) era, there have been powerful anti-urban forces at the state and federal level, and our current lack of planning for urban expansion reflects that. That tide is turning, but it will take a little while for planning to catch up in many areas, particularly since planning isn’t free and these are tough times for budgets.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:44 am
What exactly are you trying to say here? That US transit systems don’t plan for the future? I live in L.A. and am pretty familiar with L.A. Metro’s short-range and long-range transportation plans. In fact, from this page:
http://www.metro.net/projects_studies/default.htm
“Maybe L.A. is anomalous,” I thought, and looked up the DC Metro page. It wasn’t hard to find their planning and development page:
http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/planning_dev.cfm
, which has information on a variety of short-range and long-range projects. Now, granted, their Transit Service Expansion Plan doesn’t have a working link, and appears to have been last updated in 1999. But it’s not like they don’t have plans, which is what your post seems to be saying.
If you don’t like their long-term plans, or think they aren’t comprehensive enough, or whatever, criticize them for that. But the implication you have here, that they just kind of blow in the wind and lay tracks randomly, without plans, is just false.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I think a permanent funding stream for metro would be a good first step. Long-term plans with no funding sounds kind of counter-productive.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Huh?
National Capital Region’s Financially Constrained Long-Range Transportation Plan (CLRP)
August 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Adam,
I don’t know what Matt had in mind, but my understanding is that most planning for capital-intensive service expansions has been frozen at a relatively preliminary phase (basically through recommendations, but not much after that).
August 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Check out the Seattle area’s “Transportation 2040″ long range plan:
http://psrc.org/projects/trans2040/deis/index.htm
This accompanies VISION 2040 and Destination 2030, which are both long-term plans for dealing with the expected regional population growth.
What we don’t have, of course, is China’s central planning and funding apparatus that can make these things happen. These plans serve as guidance to the various, overlapping regional, state, county and city jurisdictions that fund them, but they’re subject to parochialism when it comes to rubber hitting the actual road (or steel hitting the rails, if you prefer).
But it’s not for a lack of planning.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Of course, the other reason is that Shanghai has the population of New York and a vastly smaller subway system, so they’re playing catch up, and will be for a while.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population.
Really? Not the people at the US Census Bureau. In their last set of long-range population projections, the project the District’s population to decline by almost 25% by 2030.
Maybe you were thinking about “some people” – but it’s clearly not “everyone” as is implied by your wording.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’ve also seen Matt lamenting the lack of regional planning in the U.S., when in fact there are Metropolitan Planning Organizations required by federal law for every metro area with over 500,000 people. Like the long-range transportation planning in DC, you can criticize MPOs for being underfunded, not doing the right kind of planning, not having teeth, etc., but from what I’ve seen from Matt, he’s unaware that they even exist.
As a city planner, I do appreciate how Matt brings planning issues to a broader audience, but he has some annoying blind spots. That, and he hates parks.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
The point was “if only the US could be more like Communist China, then our problems would disappear.”
August 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias notes that Shanghai has a long-term plan for expanding their subway system and laments that we’re not so forward thinking here in America. What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city. [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
In thinking about Adam’s well-taken critiques, I’m struggling to come up with what I nonetheless see as a kernel of truth in Matt’s analysis. I guess it comes down to a mismatch between the entities doing the studies and the entities which can actually authorize the necessary funding, such that what you get is long-term visions and recommendations as opposed to fully-formed plans for actual action.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
All the systems have long range plans. They’re plans by technocrats as if they would get appropriations from technocrats. Since they don’t make technocrats like Robert Moses anymore, they don’t.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“there have been powerful anti-urban forces at the state and federal level,”
DTM is correct, but I wonder if these appeared out of whole cloth, or as a reaction to wider societal preferences. There were also powerful “anti urban” (perhaps this might also be caste as pro suburban) sentiments at work in many households. For better or worse, and for whatever reason, part of the “American Dream” has come to be the detached home, white picket fence or not.
Clearly, this stems at least in part from powerful marketing from road and home builders. But just as clearly, as wonderful as I am sure Ralph Kramden’s neighborhood was, it also really, really sucked in a lot of ways. And it made sense for people to want something else.
When I was living in Pittsburgh, I was quite happy to point out that my wife and I were a model urban couple. I walked to work. We walked to local shops. We walked to church and to playgrounds. All with three kids in tow. Then someone pointed out that the people who lived in our place a generation before us had eight kids.
I think it made sense for these people (or people like them) to beat a path to the burbs. And policy makers were responding to real demands from real people to make that happen. They did so in ways that, utlimately, hid a lot of the costs of this migration.
Still,suburban living has a lot to recommend it.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States.
But we do! We just don’t do it as quickly. I just received a regional planning degree (although I ditched it for law school… bad planning), and this statement is just wrong (or maybe poorly worded).
Long term planning is required for cities with populations that are over 50,000 people. And you can find these online! So you can go check out a large city’s like Denver’s (it’s very good … I’ve had to read it, and it’s surprisingly interesting), or small cities like Red Wing, MN. These plans are usually long term (20-40 years), and get all the community, government, and business folks on board. This is all a step forward from an anything-goes approach that usually results in people segregated based on the usual factors.
Yes, there’s no a supreme leader dumping money and making specific projects happen immediately, but comphrensive plans allow cities to follow something when opportunities present themselves (or point to soemthing when developers demand quick action), and keep cities honest by having court’s evaluate more-specific land use ordinances (zoning, etc) by holding them up to the city’s more-broad comprehensive plan.
So, in DC you got a comprehensive plan laying out principles that will guide specific land use laws. Yes, they don’t have the power to build massive and useless stadiums, but this sort of incrementalism is a good thing when citizens usually have less of a say and less recourse in the land use decisions of their local planning agencies.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Chris — you are correct, it’s 50,000 people. I don’t know why I wrote 500,000… at the time I typed it I was *thinking* 50,000, but obviously the word didn’t reach my fingers.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Like the long-range transportation planning in DC, you can criticize MPOs for being underfunded, not doing the right kind of planning, not having teeth, etc., but from what I’ve seen from Matt, he’s unaware that they even exist.
But it took less than a minute on google to find the Regional Planning Organization’s website for the DC region, which of course contains the long-range transportation plan to which I linked above. It’s not even that he’s unaware they exist, it’s that he didn’t even research the question to find out.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Sam M,
I think it oversimplifies things to think of “suburbs” as a single category. For a long time we had “streetcar suburbs” in the United States, where people had detached homes, small yards, garages, and even picket fences (if they so choose), but the densities were nonetheless high enough to support public transit (at least for commuting purposes), walkable amenities, and so on. And for a while prior to and even a little after WWII, these communities continued to thrive even as automobile ownership started becoming widespread. And they still do well today whenever there is suitable public investment: that is what a lot of TOD is all about, and things like the “urban villages” that have developed along the Metro stops in Arlington are really just modern versions of the streetcar suburbs.
Now of course there is no doubt that the rise of the automobile made it possible for more people to live at lower densities while working in concentrated areas, so some of the subsequent public investment in communities too low-density for even commuting transit was to be expected. But I don’t think you can really explain the dramatic dropoff in public investment in things like the streetcar suburbs (indeed, the active disinvestment in the form of literally ripping out functioning streetcar lines) without getting into things like the pecuniary interests of automobile manufacturers and road-builders, rural overrepresentation at the state and federal level, and white flight.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
You know, on rereading Matthew’s post, perhaps we’re being a bit too hard on him. The post could be interpretted differently: he may know about the DC Region long range transit plans, but simply be saying that they don’t contain enough projects to serve the core of DC. And that may be true. After all, the regions long-range transit projects seem mostly to consist of projects in the suburbs, such as the following (all of these from the document I linked to above):
Corridor Cities Transitway, from Shady Grove to COMSAT, 2016
Purple Line, Bethesda to Silver Spring, 2015
Cherryhill VRE Station, 2012
Crystal City Potomac Yard Busway, 2010
Dulles Corridor Rapid Transit, 2014, 2015
Potomac Yard Metro Station, 2030
Potomac Yard Transitway, Arlington and Alexandria, 2013
US-1 bus right turn lanes, 2025
VA 244 Columbia Pike Streetcar from Skyline to Pentagon City, 2016
The only transit project in DC proper is “K Street Busway, 2017″.
So perhaps what Matthew is saying is – acknowledging that there is long-term planning for transit in the DC area, that long-term planning is not sufficient for what the core of DC will need. Is that a more reasonable interpretation of this post?
August 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Adam Villani Says:
August 10th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’ve also seen Matt lamenting the lack of regional planning in the U.S., when in fact there are Metropolitan Planning Organizations required by federal law for every metro area with over 500,000 people. Like the long-range transportation planning in DC, you can criticize MPOs for being underfunded, not doing the right kind of planning, not having teeth, etc., but from what I’ve seen from Matt, he’s unaware that they even exist.
As a city planner, I do appreciate how Matt brings planning issues to a broader audience, but he has some annoying blind spots. That, and he hates parks.
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Matt’s ignorance of planning is overwhelming, but it doesn’t keep him from blathering on about it. I would’ve thought getting smacked around in some of these embarrassing posts would have prompting a little outside reading on his part. Leads me to believe he may not read comments.
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What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States.
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Amazing how efficient a despotism can be sometimes.
August 10th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
WMATA appears to have several studies done on ways of improving station access and capacity, managing the fleet, etc. Assuming these get implemented (big assumption), these would all help transit in DC without involving the construction of any new lines. It’s actually pretty encouraging to see that they’re doing studies like this; all too often transportation moneys are slanted too far toward building new roads, rail lines, etc. instead of maintaining and improving what we already have. Every politician likes the photo opportunities that come with cutting the ribbon on a new highway or train station, so it’s harder to get the proper funding for the still vital but less sexy needs of our infrastructure.
Amazing how efficient a despotism can be sometimes.
It’s pretty amazing that it appears to be news to Matthew that things get built more quickly in China. Yes, the wheels of progress turn more slowly in the U.S., but at least we don’t bulldoze homes or dredge wetlands anymore without public input and review.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Regarding anti-urbanization, it was actual official U.S policy after 1945 to push industry, and hence population, to the suburbs. Read O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge.
And regarding planning…
August 10th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Washington’s Metro is starting a study, called the Core Capacity Study, to plan how to expand transit capacity in the core of D.C. The study is looking at needs for after 2025 and will try to look decades farther into the future to decide what new facilities will be most useful in the long term.
Another point – the Constrained Long Range Plan issued by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments is constrained by currently projected funding from existing sources. It doesn’t do the kind of planning that Matt is talking about in his post. Also, the COG generally adopts recommendations from the two states and D.C. rather than initiating its own projects. The recent vote by COG to disapprove a project recommended by the Virginia Dept. of Transportation, the widening of I-66 in Arlington, was considered quite unusual and was reversed at the next meeting.