thus met the requirement to permit programing of projects in the urbanized areas, their interest nagged, and without staff to keep data and analysis current, the product of the planning became less and less adequate as a basis for programing.
Not to overemphasize the negative, a majority of the States, especially those with the largest cities, maintained and even strengthened their interest, and in cooperation with the Bureau of Public Roads, universities, and other agencies, advanced the technology of planning to a highly sophisticated level, so much so that the process may well have outrun the ability to utilize it fully in administration. But despite the advances in some States, a sufficient number allowed the process to become dormant or lag so badly as to bring into question whether the requirement that the process be continuing cooperative, and comprehensive, one or another or all three, were being met. Ultimately the Federal Highway Administration found it necessary to require that the Division Engineer in each State certify annually that the planning process in each urbanzied area satisfactorily met the requirement of the 1962 Act as a basis for programing projects in those areas.
Some of the problems with respect to the planning process were the result of its success. It became widely accepted throughout all the States, as its merits were proved under actual test. It became accepted in other countries as well, as their planners observed its operation in this country, or as American consultants made their experiences available to them. Some countries literally adopted the entire process bodily. But in the enthusiasm of those who developed and were applying the process so successfully, it perhaps became oversold. It had its limitations. The process as it developed could ascertain the relationship between transportation and land use and forecast the number of trips in an area, their origins and destinations, the mode of travel that would be used. It could “assign” trips to specific routes and estimate traffic volumes with accuracy. But it was developed on a metropolitan or “coarse-grained” scale. The sampling techniques and the simulation models were fully adequate to estimate future traffic volumes on freeways and major arterial streets, for example, or on a heavily traveled transit line, but they were not sufficiently “fine-grained” to permit showing turning movements at a particular intersection or volumes on particular ramps of an interchange. It was perfectly proper and highly desirable for the Congress, in authorizing the TOPICS program,[N 1] for example, to require that projects be based on the planning process. But what the Congress perhaps did not appreciate, and what many States certainly did not, was that the process as then in operation was not the “be-all” and “end-all” in planning;, and could not provide data needed to plan minor street improvements or traffic signal timing as TOPICS required. Some State highway officials found it hard to accept that the process, so expensively organized and conducted, could not supply the simple facts needed for TOPICS. All that was needed, of course, was to expand the “3C” process to treat local situations, using tested, more conventional methods, and this was done. But the requirement to do so resulted in some disenchantment, temporarily at least, in some areas.
- ↑ Section 135 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 made the Traffic Operations Program for Improvement of Capacity and Safety (TOPICS) a continuing program.
The Future of Urban Transportation Planning
The Bureau of Public Roads and others, fully aware of the limitations of the process, once the basic job of getting planning on an acceptable basis in all urbanized areas was substantially accomplished, began exploring methods of adapting the simulations procedure to broader use. Looking toward the finer-grained traffic data needs, a “micro-assignment” procedure was developed to meet the needs of localized traffic analyses, and in the other direction, intensive effort by Bureau staff led to the development of a multiregional approach to urban transportation problems at policy, rather than planning and programing, levels.
This latter approach called TRANS, an acronym for Transportation Resources Allocation Study, made it possible to examine the effect on transportation needs of alternate land development policies and the dollar costs and benefits, direct and indirect, of various transportation alternatives to the extent pertinent factors could be expressed in monetary terms. In addition, it provided means for including “noncostable” items such as the impact of the alternatives on social and environmental areas to the extent their effects can be measured, but only in nonmonetary terms. The model is applicable to all urban areas aggregated on a national scale, or on a statewide scale, or down to the larger metropolitan areas. Its purpose, as described by two of the Bureau staff most deeply involved in its development, was:
The determination of long-range government priorities, policies, and programs is a complex process which blends hard politics with occasional naive idealism, trades off narrow interests against the common good . . . It remains the responsibility of transportation planners . . . to maintain a firm philosophical and functional commitment to provide policy formulators and decision-makers with a continuous flow of information and an objective capability for digesting and evaluating this information. The TRANS-urban approach must be viewed in this context. It is not an automatic policy making tool. It is intended solely as a mechanism that can provide rational information that was perhaps not previously available.[1]
This concise statement applies not only to the mechanical process that was developed. It defines the role of the planner as one in which he must supply usable objective data to the political leader, the decisionmaker, and it calls on the decisionmaker to use it.
The planning process has indeed become a highly sophisticated process, developed by dedicated professionals drawn from a variety of disciplines whose product was made possible only by computer technology. Applicable to all modes and to general planning as well, its development was financed virtually entirely by road-user funds. It is unequaled in any other planning area. Yet it can be effective only to the extent policymakers understand its products and accept the objective data it presents as a basis for their decisions.
Beyond the question of the mechanics or general applicability of the planning processin engineering analyses, the difficulty in gaining public acceptance of plans and programs developed from planning facts
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- ↑ An Approach to Multi-Regional Urban Transportation Policy Planning, a paper presented before the Highway Research Board by H. Kassoff and D. S. Gendell, Jan. 1971.
