Flawed planning processes and tactile learning

Flawed planning processes usually occur due to a narrowly drawn "scope of work" (as well as a failure to allow some flexibility to work outside narrow scopes, as well as lack of inclination to be creative on the part of some planning consulting firms, although most do pretty good work), and thinking within silos.

For example, most executive branch agencies focus on their regulatory function, thinking is legalistic and focused on sanctions, rather than optimization of the public good. And groups that normally don't engage in more formal planning processes take actions that may have negative public consequences, because the groups fail to take into consideration all the stakeholders of the various activities in which the organization is engaged.

Plus, a lot of times survey and consultation processes aren't well conceived or are otherwise inadequate, or at the very least, miss some important things.*

Examples:

1. Almost anything to do with the school change efforts on the part of the DC Government and the DC Public School System. The whole process is so disheartening I fear that it will result in the public education system being completely wrecked in favor of a decentralized and underaccountable charter school system seemingly public and reliant on public funds, but disconnected in many ways from public accountability. I've written about various aspects of this.

2. Most anything that DCRA does. E.g., DCRA is a regulatory agency and isn't entrepreneurial. Many of its initiatives for vending focus on licensing and revenue generation, and not creating an optimal environment to support thriving and interesting street vending.

3. The Department of Parks and Recreation and dog parks. In places where there is a paucity of public activity, especially in the frequently neglected public parks, people walking dogs can add positive activity to places that are otherwise order vacuums, and it can generate civic energies and relationships that lead to improvements in the park and beyond. DPR is focused on sanction and restriction, not enablement.

4. DDOT has put new restrictions on the "Chinese buses" that embark from Chinatown to other Chinatowns on the East Coast, in particular New York City and Philadelphia. See "Low-cost, regional bus companies forced to load in designated zone," from the Examiner.

These bus systems are under-regulated (see "Dreams and Desperation on Forsyth Street," from the New York Times) but they are an inexpensive alternative to other means of traveling between these cities.

They do create problems, because the buses are large and in DC's Chinatown, the streets are congested.

What DDOT did was force the buses over to the no man's land of L'Enfant Plaza. To an area with capacity for only two buses at a time!!!!

What DDOT should have done was figure out how to create a new combined "bus station" on New York Avenue, after all, that's where the old Greyhound Station used to be, or in the vicinity of the New York Avenue Metro Station, or at Union Station, rather than displace the service to an area of the city where it's much harder for passengers to get to, and adds logistical complexity to the trip, not to mention the need to accommodate more than two buses simultaneously.

Clearly, the riders of the service were not considered. Furthermore, you could consider the effort to be privileging the new Megabus service operating from Union Station, and perhaps even the Boltbus system over the extant Chinese-owned bus services.


4. The Washington Cathedral's proposed closure of the greenhouse caught stakeholders by surprise. I can see why the Cathedral doesn't see a greenhouse as fundamental to their mission, but they should have figured out transition alternatives, given the large number of users and stakeholders. This would have saved them a lot of grief. See "National Cathedral In Fiscal Squeeze," and "Group Offers Business Plan to Give Greenhouse New Life," from the Post.

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Rational planning doesn't work well when scope is circumscribed and various interest groups are dismissed. It doesn't work when there isn't congruence of goals and objectives on the part of the agencies, the citizens, and the user groups impacted by the agencies. And it works even less well when it is a more fixed rather than a fluid, iterative, and experimental process, before it is time to fix regulations in stone.

Sometimes I refer to how I go about learning-thinking-analyzing-doing as tactile. I read a lot. I have ideas. I look at things. But sometimes I have to be "hit in the face" with something in order to make a connection. A lot of the time, I don't think government employees are going out and talking to people, getting different perspectives, etc. At least I think that's the case, because otherwise some of the decisions I see just don't make sense.

Christopher sent this blog entry along, "Ethnography in San Francisco," from This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics where the writer talks about visiting new places and interviewing people. That's what I do when I evaluate commercial districts. I talk to a lot of people. I evaluate places. I evaluate the places that the commercial district competes with. I look at the various assets (schools, theaters, colleges, etc.), and I look at the local media in depth (newspapers, magazines, circulars, Internet-web, television, and to some extent radio). All of it goes into my thinking-writing-recommending. It is a form of ethnograpy-urban anthropology.

* In talking to a young couple in a city down south during a study I helped do, I discovered that people who've grown up in a shopping mall world with big parking lots don't have much experience with parallel parking. Because parallel parking typifies the street environment in traditional commercial districts, this can be a problem, at least in terms of perception.

Given that I am based in an urban environment where parallel parking is taken for granted, I wouldn't have thought about it if I didn't ask questions, really listen to what people said, and then ponder what they said with an open flexible mind.