Randall O'Toole -- 'All government planning is bad'
The "Antiplanner' is hated by the lovers of government passenger trains and pricey suburban light-rail lines, but he knows better than anyone why they are an obsolete waste of the public's money.
Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute is a one-man army who’s dedicated his professional life to achieving “the sunset of government planning.” It’s a noble libertarian cause, but in the era of billion-dollar light-rail boondoggles and trillion-dollar federal spending (and planning) bills it was lost decades of ago.
O’Toole is controversial, to say the least. He is hated because though he is himself a lifelong train nut who collects train memorabilia, he exposes the waste and obsolescence of government transportation modes in the 21st century and says principled things like, “I don’t expect taxpayers to subsidize (my) preferences any more than if I liked hot-air balloons or midget submarines.”
In November of 2020 O’Toole testified in Congress about the small but wasteful role that Amtrak’s passenger trains play in moving Americans around the country:
Amtrak is the gnat’s eyelash of American transportation. Americans travel an average of more than 15,000 miles per year by automobile. They fly an average of more than 2,000 miles a year. They travel an average of several hundred miles a year by bus, a hundred miles a year on foot, and 26 miles a year by bicycle. They travel an average of just 19 miles a year by Amtrak. Yes, we bicycle more than we ride intercity passenger trains. But this travel isn’t evenly distributed. Just as a few people ride bicycles a lot and most not at all, a few people ride Amtrak a lot, a few more occasionally, and most never ride it at all. Given Amtrak s irrelevance from a transportation viewpoint, it receives undue attention and subsidies from both the federal and state governments.
In 2007, when I worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, I interviewed O’Toole about what was then his new book, "The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future."
The Antiplanner
It is safe to say economist Randal O'Toole is an expert in many of the things that have caused Pittsburgh and other cities great pain -- government planning, government mass-transit systems and government attempts to shape or contain the redevelopment of cities.
A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, he specializes in urban growth, public land and transportation issues. His daily blog is called The Antiplanner (ti.org/antiplanner) and his new book is "The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future." I talked to O'Toole by telephone from his home in Bandon, Ore.
Q: Can you give us a quick synopsis of “The Best-Laid Plans”?
A: Well, I’ve often heard people say, “I’m not against planning, I’m just against bad government planning.” After 30 years of looking at government plans -- forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans -- I’ve realized all government planning is bad. Government planning -- that is to say, comprehensive, long-range planning that often tries to plan and control other people’s land and resources -- always does more harm than good because the planners don’t have an incentive to make sure that their plans are the right plans. Cities, forests and so on are just too complicated to plan, so they oversimplify, and since they don’t pay the costs of their mistakes, they don’t have an incentive to try to get it right.
Q: Who did you write the book for?
A: The book is aimed at people who are annoyed with planning but haven’t thought about what to do instead. I’m arguing that we need to stop planning. We need to repeal planning laws. Congress and the states should stop passing new planning laws. Cities should shut down planning departments and do other things instead that will actually solve the problems planning is intended to solve but too often makes worse.
Q: If you had to single out which kind of planning was most harmful, what would it be?
A: Certainly, in general, “Smart Growth” planning is planning on steroids. Back in the 1950s, we had urban renewal that devastated individual neighborhoods and often replaced them with unlivable high-rise towers that since then have been blown up because they have been proven to be so terrible to live in. But that just harmed individual neighborhoods. Smart Growth attempts to apply the same benefits to entire urban areas -- not just cities but all the suburbs, all the incorporated areas around those urban areas -- with devastating effects. Smart Growth makes housing too expensive; it makes traffic worse; it usually results in increased taxes or declining urban services. If I had to point to just one Smart Growth plan that was the worst, it would probably be San Jose’s in California. But, of course, Portland, which is often held as a shining example of good Smart Growth planning, has lots of problems too.
Q: What’s the short definition of Smart Growth?
A: The short definition is that cities should grow up, not out. They should have higher densities. They should have more pedestrian-friendly design and transit-oriented design. Transportation should be more focused around public transit, bicycles and walking than around automobiles. The higher densities are meant to encourage people to drive less and use transit more and to minimize urban sprawl -- although that’s less of a goal than just getting people out of their automobiles.
Q: What would you say to the average person to make him understand the dangers of government planning?
A: There are two big problems with planning. Everybody plans. We plan our vacations, we plan our careers. But our plans are flexible. When government writes a plan, that plan gets locked into concrete because immediately special-interest groups consisting of people and businesses that benefit from that plan form to make sure that the plan never changes. So it becomes extraordinarily difficult to change the plan no matter how mistaken and costly it turns out to be.
The second problem with planning is that cities are really, really complicated organisms. They consist of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Each of those people has different tastes, different travel needs, different housing needs and desires. It’s impossible -- literally impossible -- to plan to the level of detail to make sure that everybody achieves what they need and want. So planners oversimplify. They rely on fads.
The fad was once to tear down slums and build high-density housing projects. Then there was a fad to tear down neighborhoods and put in freeways. Now the fad is Smart Growth. -- to build cities at compact densities and provide urban transit rather than highways. But each of these fads only accounts for a small portion of the people. Less
Q: Has any city come to realize that building expensive light-rail lines is not a good idea?
A: One is Buffalo. They built one line and it shattered their transit ridership. They lost a lot of riders and they said, “We’re not going to build anymore.” Here’s the problem with rail transit: It’s so expensive -- and it almost always has cost overruns; cost overruns average 40 percent but in some cases they’ve been over 100 percent. So transit agencies end up cutting bus service and raising bus fares to help pay for the high cost of rail transit. The result is, you get fewer riders.
When Los Angeles was building its rail system, it lost 17 percent of its bus riders. They were sued by the NAACP for building rail lines into white, middle-class neighborhoods at the same time they were cutting bus service in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Q: That’s what’s going on here. Our light-rail line goes into middle-class neighborhoods and bus service is being cut back and fares are going up.
A: It’s happening in Washington, D.C., in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Jose, Portland, Sacramento -- the list is endless. Because of the lawsuit, Los Angeles had to restore bus service and pretty much has stopped building rail lines.
Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic cities will ever see the light or learn from their mistakes and end planning as we know it?
A: I’m optimistic that they will learn from Smart Growth and Smart Growth planning. It’s a generational thing.... Planners will never admit they were wrong, but they will admit their predecessors were wrong. So today, urban planners will say, “Oh, we don’t believe in that urban renewal, high-density housing-project stuff. That was the mistakes of bad urban planners of the past.” But then they make other mistakes. Whether cities are actually going to give up on planning, that's a tougher nut. I’m hoping that we can persuade people that Smart Growth is so bad that we’ll just never try planning again.