The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole

A study from Oregon State University confirms that “the association between sprawl and obesity reported in earlier studies is largely due to self-selection rather than to the impacts of the urban environment on physical activity and weight.”¹⁹

      If sprawl does not cause obesity, there is no justification for Smart Growth America’s call to rebuild the suburbs. People who actually want to reduce obesity should work on increasing incomes, education, or other factors that have much larger effects on obesity and health and that would cost less and produce far more benefits than rebuilding neighborhoods to fit some planning utopia.

      A similarly flawed study recently blamed chronic health problems on low-density suburbs. It was based on a telephone survey that asked people how many chronic diseases they had in their households. Like the obesity study, the survey did not distinguish between suburbs and cities, so the pseudoscientists who did this study compared answers for low-density urban areas versus high-density urban areas. The urban areas with the most diseases were in Florida, which was not surprising because the average age in those areas was much higher than most other areas. After adjusting for age, incomes, and education, they still found sprawl to be a factor, but the statistical reliability was low. For example, the sprawling Atlanta and Minneapolis-St. Paul regions both had lower incidences of chronic diseases than the much more compact San Francisco and New York regions.²⁰

      Instead of relying on a crude telephone survey, researchers could have compared actual health and mortality records in cities and suburbs. One study that did found that mortality rates are significantly higher in cities than in rural areas, while suburban rates are only slightly higher.²¹

      The application of databases to problems for which they were not designed, the assumption that correlation equals causation, and claims of strong results from weak correlations are all indicators of pseudoscience. Planners are especially ready to use and rely on pseudoscience because the scientific basis for their own work is so weak.

      Many of the pseudoscientific studies were conducted by planning advocates and they are widely cited by planners who firmly believe that suburbs reduce people’s sense of community and increase obesity and other health problems. These planners also take for granted that improved urban designs will go far toward solving these problems.²²

      The Democracy Problem

      When confronted with criticisms about their plans, planners often point to their public involvement processes. “Hundreds of people came to our meetings and commented on our plans,” they say. “So we must be doing something right.”

      Wrong. Planning is inherently undemocratic. Efforts to involve the public mainly attract people who have a special interest in the outcome of the plans. As one Oregon pollster dryly reported, the people who actually commented on Portland’s regional plan “hold views that are not necessarily reflective of the community as a whole.”²³

      There is a good reason for this. People have a limited amount of time in their lives. They are inclined to spend that time on things that they can influence and that affect them the most. They will spend time studying cars because when they buy a car, they get the benefits and, if they make a mistake in their purchase, they pay most if not all the costs. But few people will spend much time on elections because their vote is unlikely to influence the outcome and, even if it does, the cost of any mistake they make is shared with everyone else.

      Planning processes are even less likely to attract the public than elections. Getting involved in planning requires a much greater commitment of time than simply voting, and the process is so nebulous that there is no assurance that planners will even listen to the public. The planners in charge will rarely commit to any kind of voter democracy, that is, to agreeing to abide by the preferences expressed by the public during the process.

      At the same time, some groups have a strong interest in getting involved in planning either for ideological reasons or because planning can enrich their businesses. The usual result when a few special interests get involved in a process ignored by everyone else is to develop a plan that accommodates the special interests at everyone else’s expense. This is why rail transit, for example, has become so popular: although it does nothing that buses can’t do as well or better, it costs far more than buses, and the companies that stand to profit from it promote it among politicians and are even hired by planners as “independent experts” to develop regional transit plans.

      Even if public involvement processes could be truly democratic, planners are not sure they want them to be. This is confirmed by a national survey of planners. While more than three out of four believed that public involvement was important for identifying problems, less than half the planners surveyed believed that members of the public “[had] the requisite reflective ability to contribute” to later stages in planning. Instead of truly believing in public involvement, most “planners think of the planning process as an intellectual activity in which substantive expertise, the planners’ forte, is the primary requirement,” so the average member of the public is not qualified to participate.²⁴

      In fact, many planners viewed public involvement as merely an opportunity for politicians to stifle the good recommendations made by planners. As a result, “some planners advocate increasing the statutory authority of planning departments, so that planners’ recommendations can have the force of law.” “There is little recognition,” comments the planner who did the survey, “that political constraints on planners’ influence may reflect public concerns about limiting the role of experts in democratic decision making.”²⁵

      In public, most planners give lip service to democracy, but among themselves they take a very different attitude. A guest speaker at a recent conference of a state chapter of the American Planning Association was an elected city councilor who, before her election, worked as an urban planner. She told her audience of planners, “Planners are the brains of our city. They tell the neighborhood groups what must be done, and the neighborhood groups then make the city councils do it.”²⁶

      “From conventional planners’ point of view, participation of laypeople in the planning process is not desirable, or even nonsensical,” writes one disapproving planner. “Planning is a technical matter which has to be carried out on the basis of rationality; ordinary people who are not technically trained have to submit to the intellectual authority of planners.”²⁷

      The Decisionmaker Problem

      No matter how smart the planners or how good their intentions, no plan will ever reduce every variable to a number that can be put into a computer program. Even things that can be quantified are not always comparable; for example, how should we rationally weigh the tradeoff between saving endangered species and saving jobs? Due to the subjective nature of planning, different people will interpret many elements of the plan differently. Into this pool of vagueness steps the decisionmaker—an elected official, legislative body, or director of a bureaucracy—who is conditioned by incentives to make a particular decision regardless of the plan.

      The decisionmaker may be corrupt, motivated by under-the-table bribes, or promises of cushy jobs once retired from his or her current position. More likely, the decisionmaker has a set of goals that are heavily conditioned by the years spent climbing the bureaucratic or political ladder. Decisionmakers know that certain decisions will likely be rewarded by voters or the legislators who fund the agency, while others might be punished. No matter what the plan says, the decisionmaker will listen to those who cast their ballots or write the checks or face replacement with someone who will.

      Elected officials’ incentives differ from agency officials’, but neither guarantee that the public interest is foremost in their minds. Government agencies are best thought of as ecosystems in which various ideas compete and evolve in response to outside forces— the most important of which is the agency’s budget. Most environmental and social problems have vague or uncertain causes, and there is often wide disagreement within agencies like the Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Transportation about what the actual goals of the agencies should be and how they should achieve those goals. The ideas that win