Planning as a dialectic

This will come off as a little disembodied, because it's part of a thread from an e-list on new mobility (newmobilitycafe@yahoogroups.com). The list has world-wide participants.

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Here's the problem, at least in my experience in the U.S. Planners plan. Planners are subject to suasion by the political and economic elite. Planners use the rational planning model, which tends to be overly constrained, with narrowly defined scopes of work for planning processes.

(When I worked on one such plan, not a transportation plan, but a commercial district revitalization plan, I ignored the constraints, and did a wide-ranging analysis, but then, every hour I spent extra meant I made less money/hour, a lot less.)

Planning processes for the most part aren't allowed to be creative, or to go outside of the boundaries of the scope. And plans are mostly vision. And generally there are disconnects between planning and zoning. Zoning for the most part is parcel focused, while planning focuses on overall districts, districts in which a particular piece of land is only a part of the whole. But it is the urban form as a whole that matters to us as people living and working in and using spaces.

All developers do, for the most part, is build buildings. They can build them adjacent to transit or as part of walkable communities or not. If the buildings are adjacent to transit, then they need to be linked to and built around these linkages.

But for the most part, zoning regulations, even with the extranormal requirements of "planned unit developments" aren't fine grained enough to really bring this about.

Getting back to planning, transportation planning is at best, about transportation, not just highways, but given the theme/name of this list, I am coming to the belief that transportation planning really needs to be repositioned even further, on "mobility and public spaces planning" with the requisite changes in vision and focus.

That was reflected in the blog entry I just sent.

Municipalities bobble this too. E.g., in Montgomery County Maryland they are building an "intermodal" transit station atop the Silver Spring subway station, which will include the adjoining railroad stop, the WMATA and RideOn (county) buses, and bring the inter-city buses over. The website chortles about the connection that will be provided to local bike trails. But even though the station is in a large office district, there will be no bicycle station within the center. There may be one built nearby at some time in the future, but there is no funding for it...

We have a fair way to go yet to get to New Mobility.