Five Steps to Successful Transportation Planning (and how to tell a NIMBY from a Naysayer)

Imagine yourself as a political official with authority over a city's transportation system. Your task is to build an efficient, functional transportation system in your city.
Let's assume that, for external reasons, exponential growth is headed your way. Your current infrastructure can't possibly handle it all. What do you do?

Step 1: Don't freak out.
All too often, planners faced with exponential growth panic. They propose outlandish plans to double, or even triple, the capacity of primary roadways. Georgia's Department of Transportation (DOT) did this with Atlanta's expressway network in the 1980s. For their trouble, they got some of the worst congestion resulting from induced demand the US has seen.

Step 2: Learn from the failures of your predecessors.
California built a staggering number of freeway lane-miles in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them in urban areas. It was very impressive-from the air. From the ground, it was bad enough to give rise to a new phrase, "road rage." Unfortunately, in the 2000s under Governor Schwarzenegger, California planners went old school and started building urban freeways again.  Neither the former governor nor his advisors connected the dots and realized that their approach had no more chance of success than did their predecessors'. Indeed, despite of the continuing gridlock, the former governor claimed in a recent interview on The Nerdist Podcast that his freeway construction was one of his great legacies. That's an odd way to feel about a collection of what are effectively parking lots during rush hour.

Step 3: Don't just react to circumstances.
If you simply take a reactive approach, you'll end up with a mess. Consider this hypothetical scenario: Main Street is jammed with cars, buses, and pedestrians. So, you decide to add vehicle capacity to the road by widening it. This penalizes pedestrians, of course, but maybe you're hoping to fix that later.
The added capacity induces demand, as it always does in urban areas, so you decide to build a bypass. That induces more demand, so you widen the bypass which induces still more demand. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The reactive approach, wildly popular in the mid-20th century US and currently in vogue in China, is great for keeping construction companies happy, but lousy for actually accomplishing anything. Try to anticipate conditions so that your solutions are sustainable.

Step 4: Get some vision.
This is easier said than done, as engineers and technocrats are seldom trained, or even asked, for creative vision. Vision requires the capability to step back and imagine the best result. Engineers and technocrats are usually expected to just make sure the details are right.
No, you need not be an artist (though that could lead to some amusing results), but you must have knowledge in a broad variety of fields so you can synthesize them into a holistic view of the urban environment. For instance, psychology gives insight into how pedestrian pathways tend to gravitate towards a straight line, even if it leads to walking a muddy track or jaywalking across an expressway. Sociology offers perspective on why Americans tend to shun buses, but ride streetcars, even when there's no difference in travel times. Political Science might give you a clue as to why mass transit is unpopular in the GOP-dominated American South, but highly prized in Democratic strongholds on the East and West Coasts. Bottom line: read outside your professional box.

Step 5: Don't confuse naysayers with NIMBYs.
Naysayers are those who reflexively say no to any change, even if it doesn't affect them directly. NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) are, as the name suggests, directly affected opponents.
However, someone who is adjacent to project doesn't necessarily start out as an opponent. For example, suppose a redevelopment project that will boost homevalues by eliminating ugly, decrepit warehouses ends up with strong NIMBY opposition because someone in a neighborhood association excitedly spread wordthat traffic would be awful. Never mind that the site is well-connected to transit and in a highly walkable area. Professional staff opinions will count for nothing, because those opinions are grounded in evidence. The naysayers who are whipping up the NIMBYs into a frenzy are manipulating emotions and have no need or use for evidence.

If you consider yourself a leader, you will have to be able to disregard dishonest naysayer objections and push forward. Luckily, in politics memories are surprisingly short. Those NIMBYs who want to burn you in effigy today may reluctantly admit you were right tomorrow, especially if the results of your projects are discernibly different from the apocalypse forecast by naysayers. But, this favorable outcome won't happen if you skip any of these steps.

America's Fear of Trains

America’s political elite has an unusual phobia. They are terrified of large, metal machines that are guided by rails. This doesn’t apply to all large metal machines, such as SUVs. They just can’t abide the ones with rails underneath them. 

A recent blog from the Heritage Foundation provides the clearest example of this irrational fear by using the headline, “Transportation Secretary Wants Us to Be Like Communist China!” You might expect Secretary LaHood to appear wearing a Mao suit, but apparently his sin was to call for more investment in high-speed rail (HSR). He further offended Heritage by comparing America’s commitment to HSR to China’s and found it lacking.

China's High-Speed Rail in service. No sign of terrified Heritage Foundation writers in this picture. Photo courtesy of Khalidshou/Wikipedia

Those who oppose rail transit tend to gravitate towards the same talking points as in Heritage’s blog. They are:

1.       It’s fiscally irresponsible, since passenger railroads always need subsidies.

2.       The public will never ride in trains because they love their cars so much.

3.       A federally-funded HSR program is an intrusion on states’ rights.

The first point is perhaps the oddest. Heritage cited a Voice of America article that, in turn, cited China’s Academy of Science’s claim that fares from the Chinese HSR system would never be enough to pay off the construction loans. A large portion of these costs may be generated by corruption, which Heritage insinuates is inevitable in big government projects. Heritage appears to be unaware that government corruption in China isn’t just limited to big rail projects. 

I would imagine that the assumption that HSR and corruption go hand-in-hand would be quite a surprise to Germany, builder of the ICE bullet train, and Japan, home of the Shinkansen. Both nations ranked far higher than China on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and slightly higher than the United States.

A corruption-free German ICE train. Photo courtesy of Sebastian Terfloth/Wikipedia.

Cost estimates for US HSR projects range from $50 million ---via an American Enterprise Institute scholar---to a range between $35 million and $50 million---courtesy of a former chairman of California’s High Speed Rail Authority.  That sounds pretty high, until you compare it to the cost of a toll-free interstate highway. A simple upgrade of the Century Freeway in Los Angeles and various routes in Orange County cost between $25 million and $29 million per mile (inflation adjusted from 1994 levels). That’s money thrown into the gas tank and burned, because in less than five years those improvements will have no effect on these roads’ level of service. Just try driving these routes in the late afternoon to verify. Plus, it’s all being paid for out of taxes (fuel and general revenues, mostly). How’s that for a subsidy?

So what about the second point? Will the public refuse to ride a high-speed train? Acela, the high-speed train running from Washington to Boston, certainly isn’t running empty. In the first six months of FY 2012 ridership hit 1.6 million passengers. That’s comparable to traffic out of Washington’s Reagan National Airport bound for New York and Boston on the US Air and Delta Shuttles. Acela isn’t exactly cheap, thanks to Congress’s attempts to starve Amtrak of subsidies, but it takes you directly to Manhattan. The Delta Shuttle out of Washington takes you to LaGuardia Airport in Queens. Expect a hefty cab fare to get into the city, because there’s no rail connection of any kind.

California’s HSR will tie the state’s two largest metropolitan regions together. Opponents claim its first leg will be underutilized, since it will not reach either San Francisco or Los Angeles. However, this is not unprecedented: the first long-distance superhighway built in the US, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, didn’t reach either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. It stopped well short of both because builders were using the right-of-way of an unbuilt railroad to get at least some of it built quickly and cheaply. That’s EXACTLY what HSR planners in California are doing. We all know the impact of this first superhighway: rail travel, which had been dominant, declined and nearly died off entirely. The car became supreme because it was perceived as being faster.  That perception is steadily weakening on the highly-congested Interstate 5 corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles, so HSR has some competitive space to get established.

This segues into Heritage’s final point that these decisions are best left to the states. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was a state effort, so opponents might point to this as an example of state-led innovation. However, efforts to expand the nation’s network of superhighways crept along at a Model T’s pace until passage of the Interstate and Defense Highways Act (aka the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956) under President Eisenhower. 

This includes Pennsylvania’s own efforts to add onto the Turnpike. The first stretch opened in 1940; it wouldn’t reach Philadelphia until 1950. The proposed extensions to other parts of the state would not get built until Eisenhower’s Interstate program came into existence in 1956. That’s right---it took federal involvement to get things done.

This is the inherent weakness in the argument of those who view federal programs as an intrusion into states’ rights. To think that California could build an entire HSR line without massive federal assistance is as absurd as expecting Pennsylvania or a more rural state like Alabama to build their interstate highway system without any help. 

Perhaps the final irony in all of this is that the Heritage Foundation, a group traditionally allied with the Republican Party, is arguing against the approach endorsed by that same party at its founding. As Patt Morrison pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, the Republicans incorporated in the mid-19^th century federal funding of a transcontinental rail link to California into their party’s platform.  They did not insist that Nebraska self-finance its section. Corruption was rife in the project, as China is experiencing with their HSR, but it’s hard to argue that the Transcontinental Railroad was a mistake. In fact, it’s hard to see how the US could have become an industrial powerhouse without it.  

A train in a museum display going nowhere, rather like Heritage's vision for the US transportation system. Photo by the author.

It’s just as difficult to imagine how the US can sustain its global economic position today if it fails to embrace the same transportation technology now in place in Germany, Japan, and China. Nobody gets ahead if they let their fears paralyze them. Let’s hope the Heritage Foundation and its allies get over their rail-phobia soon.

Son of the Airport that Ate Atlanta

I’ve already addressed the ever-growing creature that is Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It’s a very hungry critter that has devoured whole neighborhoods and communities in the name of greater efficiency. However, that size came at the price of convenience, since it can take an hour to go from your arrival gate to your parked car.

Little did I expect to find an airport that is even more voracious for space: Beijing’s Daxing Airport. At a projected 54 square kilometers (33.5 square miles, for those of you too stubborn to embrace the metric system), it will dwarf Atlanta’s 19 square kilometers (almost 12 square miles). Granted, much of that space will be taken up by the nine runways to be built there. But just think of how big the terminal will have to be in order to service the flights filling up those runways. Don’t expect to book a flight there very soon: the projected opening isn’t until 2017.

If you think you’ve heard about a new airport in Beijing recently, you’re not suffering from déjà vu. The city expanded its main airport just prior to the start of the Olympics in 2008. Designed by the famous architect, Sir Norman Foster, the enlarged Beijing Capital Airport is capable of handling 75 million passengers per year. Unfortunately, usage is already past 73 million passengers per year and it cannot be expanded easily, or at all. It currently holds the rank of second-busiest airport in the world behind Atlanta’s airport.

It’s not foreign businesspeople who are jamming China’s airports, though. Most passengers flying through Beijing are domestic, which is pretty typical. As I pointed out previously, most of Atlanta’s passengers are on domestic flights. London’s Heathrow airport is perhaps one of the more unusual, as its passengers tend to be international. Interestingly, Daxing is likely to steal the title of world’s busiest airport for international passengers from Heathrow upon opening. Given how notoriously awful Heathrow is (the British comedy group Monty Python had a memorable song about its baggage retrieval system), you have to wonder about the desirability of that title. 

Civic leaders near big airports like to boast about where they rank on the “World’s Busiest” list. Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare are forever vying for the title of the world’s busiest (counting all passengers), because it conveys the illusion of economic vitality. I say illusion because most of the passengers at these airports never set foot in their respective cities; they simply connect to another flight straight out of there. At most, they might glimpse the skyline. 

However, cities with large, busy airports do boast flights to many destinations. That can make a difference in luring new investment to a region, but only if the airport is truly usable. Chicago O’Hare is known to be busy, but hardly convenient or pleasant. It ranked 6^th in a recent survey by Travel and Leisure of the worst airports in the US.  The many expansions the airport underwent over the decades resulted in terminals that are laid out like an M.C. Escher drawing. Heathrow has a comparable layout, while Atlanta’s layout recently underwent a radical change with the addition of the international terminal on the far side of the property from the old (now domestic) terminal.

China’s planners opted to put Daxing airport 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of the city. It’s so far away that planners had to justify it by saying it was intended to serve cities other than Beijing. A new expressway will have to be built to it, along with a high-speed train line.

Ironically, it’s this latter item that could end up saving Chinese travelers from the purgatory of an airport that’s too big to traverse. China’s high-speed rail infrastructure topped 10,000 kilometers (6250 miles) in 2012, which makes it a viable competitor to domestic airlines. That’s the good news. 

The bad news is that the Chinese government has not kept up with where the money went very well. A massive embezzlement scheme is being blamed for rail disaster in 2011 that killed 40 passengers. Given how widespread Chinese government corruption appears to be, you have to wonder how safe their new airport will be.