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SECRETARY'S ADDRESS ON PLANNING, IMPLEMENTATION, AND OPERATIONS By KEVIN E. HEANUE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION Sometime late last evening we ended up with nine program areas, but I think the way we got there and some of the conclusions we reached in the process are more important than the nine areas themselves. The areas will be included in our report and I will highlight them at the end. But I would now like to focus on the steps we used and some of those intermediate conclusions we reached. We spent quite some time discussing the role of the university and its strengths in ideation, synthesis of ideas, codification of ideas, and the training of students. One thing that came out of this discus- sion was that we feel that the university program has not placed signi- ficant emphasis on the role of the university in the training of the students and on the fact that every university contract project is going to contain much student input. In fact, this aspect tends to be deemphasized in the administration of the program. Next, we concluded that the university should produce results in a form ready for dissemination, but that dissemination is primarily a DOT responsibility. We felt that the universities were not particu- larly well qualified to take on this latter role. Also, we found that the implementation of results should be primarily a DOT, local agency, and industry role, and that only in exceptional cases should univer- sities be involved in implementation. We came to a very strong conclusion that the program should support fundamental research by universities as well as problem-centered research. If there was one overriding complaint about the program, it was its focus on issues that have immediate payoff to the exclusion of research of a fundamental nature. There is no other program funded by DOT or any other source that is willing to support fundamental research, and if the university program does not, it will not get done. We addressed the balance between technological and nontechnol- Ogical research and the relative emphasis that should be placed on multi-disciplinary versus single-disciplinary research. We came to the conclusion that the program should fund high priority projects from all subject areas and that projects should not be codified or given 60
a technological or nontechnological priority. Let the projects come in. Do not attempt to prequalify or prestate the emphasis on the technological or nontechnological. Sort it out in the selection process rather than ahead of time. Again, we believe that in an interdisciplinary approach, the emphasis should be on good projects. We agreed that universities should not be told how to organize to do research. We want to stress again that the strength of the universities is in developing ideas and that we should be seeking out good ideas and not placing a number of pre- conditions on the proposals. The size and location of the universities should not be a criterion. The emphasis should be on good projects. We place very strong emphasis on reserving a portion of the funds for allocation to longer term research. It should be recognized that many before and after studies will take six to eight years to do preliminary planning, data collection, observation, and follow up studies. We thought that maybe 10 percent of the program might be reserved for long-term research -- longer than is presently accepted under the pro- gram. Bill Garrison pointed out that there is a 32-year ongoing project at UCLA. Someone has come up with the funding over that period. Nothing similar exists in transportation. In our discussions, we started out by having everyone state what they thought were priority research areas. The coverage was fairly broad. Before getting into these fairly broad areas, we wanted to emphasize our endorsement of the priorities reflected in Marty Wachs' paper, which we think really did focus on the overriding issues in planning, operations, and management. In the next decade the action will be, first, in transportation systems management, and in the efforts to make our existing systems more efficient. Second, we need to fill the gaps where existing systems do not provide adequate service. Third, as we fill in the gaps and consider investment, both in capital and operating assistance, we must give high priority to the equity question: Who is benefiting and who is bearing the burden of our investments? In the longer term -- issues with longer term payoffs -- Pro- fessor Wachs identified a fourth area, the need for new approaches to comprehensive planning. A fifth area is a study of the transportation and spatial form relationships. We felt that to reap longer term payoffs the research must be undertaken now. It will produce short- term benefit as well. 61
In addition to the five areas just described, we next took some sixteen to eighteen program areas identified by the individual panelists and grouped them into four new areas, or categories, to complete our list of nine. The first general category we called improving, expanding, defining,and understanding the ability to predict consequences of societal options. This involves the fundamental relationships between options and their costs, performance, and impacts. Here I saw much overlap with the groupings and categories that the last two panels discussed. The next general category we called improving the planning pro- cess to make it more responsive to options. This should include the basic tools, techniques,and strategies which are planning processes. The next category involves enhancing the ability to implement social choices and to face the organizational and the institutional issues. We came to the conclusion that perhaps 99 percent of our ongoing research deals with existing technology and existing options and that there are all kinds of institutional impediments to new work. Wilfred Owen described for us some really fascinating innovation that is going on in a major city in Brazil, a city that did not want to get caught in the subway-freeway syndrome. The city established pedestrian precincts in their downtown -- streets are being narrowed, creating linear parks. And in public transportation they are using buses that seat 100 people. He also pointed out that the environment in which this is all taking place is a dictatorship. Our democracy does not seem to permit us to innovate in such a rapid fashion, and we see a need to explore the institutional reasons for this. The last category and the ninth area on our list was operations and management; the tactics for operating transportation systems on a day to day basis. Let me pause here to say that because of its dominance in this country in the past, the majority of our funds have been spent in urban planning. We realize that our discussions tended to focus on urban planning issues. This was not intentional, and we want our report to be viewed in broad terms as encompassing urban as well as regional and multi-regional planning and not merely highway and transit, but the rail and air issues as well. Let me now return to the four general categories just briefly described and expand on these. Under category 1 we talked about devel- oping methods to evaluate total cost, capital, and operating components of transportation systems and total transportation systems. We believe that elected officials just do not feel they are getting adequate cost information before being asked to make major funding decisions. There is a need to attempt to develop abilities to describe, understand, and predict performance and impacts of options through before-and-after studies, ongoing systematic studies, and short-and long-term trade-off 62
analysis. We saw the need through Transportation System Management (TSM) to get into the whole issue of auto disincentives with the caution that significant emphasis must be placed on impacts to downtown business. The development of a better understanding of the markets for various trans- portation options is needed, including understanding trade-offs and the relation between markets, how the economy uses transportation, the distributional aspects of transportation, who benefits, who loses, who pays. There is a need to develop an understanding of the relationship between transportation options and life styles, urban structure, and thé nature of the future. It will be important to study the relation- ship between transportation and communications as a substitute for transportation and more generally how to use transportation to influence the attainment of future goals. Some of the program areas defined in category 2 included developing the capability to incorporate technology into planning, thereby not restrict- ing planning to existing options. We recognized the preponderance of all planning going on today is dealing with options that are in existence and in use today. A more responsive planning process should be developed that will address short-term as well as long-term issues, and that will correct the imbalance on the long-term infrastructure that we have had in the past. Better tools and perspectives should be developed for integrating planning, implementation, and operations. We need to be sharper in identifying trade-offs in short-term options. We recognize the need for research on strategies for planning in the face of uncertainty, the need for studies of risk amelioration, and the need to bring into transportation some of the risk considerations inherent in other planning processes. In category 3, there is a need for comparative studies of organizational and institutional structures to help us understand and develop strategies for improving intergovernmental relations, including the separation and sharing of both resources and powers. It is important to develop an understanding of societal decision processes in order to use transportation for the attainment of societal goals. There is need to explore and understand ways to integrate transportation into urban development, not restricting it to new urban development, but recognizing the vital role transportation has to play in the restoration and renewal of entire downtowns, center city neighborhoods, from macro-scale to really micro-scale issues. There should be further work to explore the effects of funding patterns and institutional arrangements on choice of transportation options. In category 4, operations and management, there must be explora- tion of the ideal integration and organization of transportation systems 63
and their various operational phases. How can transportation systems be fine-tuned on a day-to-day basis? It is important to attempt to define the skills, tasks, and training needs of transit and transportation system managers. In our discussion it was stated that the first highway engineers were soils engineers. The country wanted to get the highway system out of the mud, and the soils engineers were the people to do it. Soon, the soils engineers began calling themselves highway engineers. Then in the 1950's the highway engineers began calling themselves high- way planners. That is where the action was. In the late 1960's the highway planners began calling themselves transportation planners and more lately the transportation planners are calling themselves trans- portation system managers. Yet, they are still working from the basic engineering skills that the soils engineer brought to bear on his pro- blem of getting the farmer out of the mud. We need to go to people who deal with industry in terms of defining jobs, defining the mix of skills, and writing position descriptions. There is a need for more innovation in transportation management. 64
