The Eight Myths of Transport Planning

David Engwicht

This material is a short summary of a chapter from Street Reclaiming: Creating Livable Streets and Vibrant Communities. Some of it is quite dated now. For example, I would no longer talk about problems and solutions like I do here. Never-the-less it still provides a useful framework for the way with think about transport.

I have organized this material around eight myths and assumptions that currently drive transport planning in most cities. (These are not the same 8 myths that appeared in Traffic Calming.) By exposing these myths I hope to show why current approaches to transport planning are not working and show the underlying approach adopted in second-generation Traffic Calming. I trust this helps you understand more clearly the heart of what I am proposing so that you do not merely follow the suggested ideas slavishly.

Myth 1: Changing individual behavior is the key to building a more efficient transport system

Traffic is not one person driving a car (one or two cars do not cause social segregation, air pollution, noise pollution, or congestion). The problems caused by traffic are a 'collective phenomenon' — any arrangement in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The solutions to this collective phenomenon cannot be therefore based in changing individual behavior but in finding collective, community based solutions. For example, getting one person to reduce their car use may simply encourage someone else to expand their inefficient car use. It is fine to ask individuals to change their behavior, but this must be within the envelope of a wider, collective strategy that takes account of how the entire system works.

Myth 2: Transport can be fixed by providing new 'hardware' items

Most people believe the solutions to traffic problems are new hardware items -- a wider road, better public transport, a new bikeway, etc. But traffic problems are the result of a complex web of social, cultural and physical factors. For example, many parents drive their kids to school because the roads are seen as too dangerous. The roads are too dangerous because all the other parents are driving their kids to school. Solutions must be designed around intervention in the total web. Most often, the crucial links in the web are the social and cultural realities and people's mental attitudes.

Myth 3: Major changes in behavior will take generations

There is a strong belief that changing car culture will take generations. However, this is built on a faulty understanding of how cultural change takes place. History shows that major change can happen very quickly -- e.g. changes in attitude to smoking and trash recycling. I believe that cultural revolutions are 'triggered' in two different ways.

Release of a submerged value: Community values are not a simple black and white world. For example, as motorists we all highly value speed. But as parents or residents, other people's speed is a curse. We often resolve these external and internal conflicts by 'ignoring' one of the contradictory voices. Cultural revolutions often happen when the submerged voice is given an equal hearing with the dominant voice.

Celebration: Often celebrations legitimize or give vent to a submerged value.

Cultural revolutions are triggered, not by attacking the dominant value but by legitimizing the paradoxical, submerged value. So, for example, the Pace Car Program does not attack the car but celebrates the potential for it to calm itself. Street reclaiming celebrates the traditional role of the street.

Myth 4: Streets and cities can be treated as a 'machine'

Engineers and planners treat streets as a 'machine' for moving vehicles. But this is a totally inappropriate model. Streets are a complex 'ecosystem'. Seeing streets as a machine requires rationalizing the functions of the street. Seeing them as an ecosystem requires the exact opposite: the layering of functions and the encouraging of spontaneity, ambiguity and contradiction. Street reclaiming enriches the street environment by bringing back complexity.

Myth 5: Human nature is basically selfish

Decision makers proceed on the basis that human nature is basically selfish and must be 'controlled'. However, humans also exhibit altruism -- giving to others without expecting a pay back. The greatness of any city or civilization depends on the extent of altruism over selfish activity. Planning should trade on three resources currently ignored: altruism, creative wealth, and resourcefulness.

Myth 6: Economics can be divorced from everyday life

Economics is viewed as a world unto itself. But economics is tied to every facet of city life. In fact cities were an invention to improve the economy with which exchanges could be transacted. Building strong, robust neighborhoods is the best way of building a strong and robust economy.

Myth 7: It is important to get the big picture right first

Planning professionals believe that if they get the big picture right, the details will fall into place. However, this view is based in a machine model of the city. An ecosystem model suggests that the opposite is true; strategic changes at the micro level can create a domino effect, which totally changes the big picture. Our cities 'got sick' through one bad cell infecting the next cell. They are 'made well' by the exact reverse process.

Myth 8: Fixing problems requires greater levels of intervention

Many people believe that fixing a problem requires greater levels of planning or intervention. But 'over-planning' may have contributed to many of the problems we are now grappling with — an inefficient city; environments that lack 'character' and sense of place; an erosion of the democratic process. Every organism within nature is stamped with its own unique personality. Nature does this by imposing minimum control over otherwise chaotic processes within the organism. The greater the 'control functions' the more energy the organism consumes in managing the process and the greater the standardization of a species (with implications for survivability). The solutions to many of our most pressing problems does not lay in inventing new mechanisms of control and policing, but rather in inventing mechanisms for handing back the responsibility for solving the problem to the citizens. In many cases this means authorities refusing to try and solve problems for residents but rather equipping the residents to solve the problem themselves.