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PLANNING, IMPLEMENTATION, AND OPERATIONS By MARTIN WACHS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES As the last speaker, I have the significant disadvantage of having to say things that all the other panelists have already said. It is really kind of amazing how we independently arrived at very similar statements about priorities. The problems we face are not as new as we might think -- or as different as we might think from those that have faced the transporta- tion community for a long time. Yet, there might be one difference between our discussions in 1976 and those of earlier decades. I, for one, feel much less able to make pronouncements about the future with the same certainty that my colleagues of earlier decades demonstrated. I find, for example, that proceedings of conferences similar to this one that took place in the 1950's stated with certainty that highest priority should be given to comprehensive land use and transportation planning to provide for the emerging needs of the next two decades. With the experience of those two decades now at hand, and with an era of continual adjustment to growth at an end, I don't think our course and our priorities for the next two decades seem nearly that clear to us any longer. I feel a great deal more humble about setting priorities for research in planning and implementation than my earlier colleagues seem to have felt, and I will launch into my discussion of those priorities with the hope that nobody will find the proceedings of this conference in 1996 and quote me as an example of the mis- informed older generation. I believe that transportation policy at federal, state, and local levels will be dominated during the next five to ten years by a concern for getting more service for more people out of the existing capital plant that is already built or under construction. While we will certainly construct new facilities to some extent, greater em- phasis will be placed upon managing existing systems and existing technological options to provide more efficient service. Within this theme of system management for increased service, there are several important challenges and dilemmas that I believe are appropriately addressed through university research and, thus, should be given high priority. 32
One reason we are elevating system management to higher priorities than capital investment is that we are trying to incorporate into transport decisions the full range of social, economic, and environ- mental costs which, until recently, were unknown or largely ignored. Thus, we are now attempting to minimize the consumption of fossil fuels, reduce the emission of harmful air pollutants, and develop transport plans that avoid social, aesthetic, and economic disruptions of communities. The second major theme of current transport policy is the exten- sion of mobility to those members of society who were previously left out as the automobile became the dominant means of transportation. Thus, we have recently become very concerned with the transport needs of those who do not drive, especially the elderly, the young, the physically handicapped, and the poor. Investments in "systems management" are seen, in part, as ways of filling in the gaps as some people and some transit operations were left behind during decades of increased reliance on the auto. On the surface these two major policy goals seem compatible. Improved transit systems would appear to have the potential of providing for the carless while also attracting some drivers away from their polluting and energy-consuming automobiles. In the United States, however, we have been implementing separate programs in pursuit of each of these objectives, and potential comple- mentarity among them is not materializing. For example, in major metre- politan areas new rail systems are being planned and built which are intended primarily to serve environmental and energy objectives by attracting today's auto commuters. Thus, high-speed trains or express bus operations are being designed to link suburban areas with downtown centers. To achieve high service levels, these systems have few and widely-spaced stations. To reach the major commuter markets, these Stations are generally located in middle-to-upper class suburbs and in downtown office centers. The poor and carless, however, do not usually live in suburban communities and the vast majority do not travel to downtown districts very often. The elderly, especially, do not require access to down- town work centers to the extent that they require access to local and dispersed public services such as health care and recreation. In response to this need, we have instituted in the U.S. dozens of separate programs which provide financial support to health care centers, seniar- citizens' recreation centers, veterans' care centers, and nutrition programs, so that each can operate its own system of vans or minibuses. Though intended to insure that clients will not be denied any necessary service because it is inaccessable, transport services are provided at relatively high operating cast to the sponsoring programs 33
and often carry fewer riders than their intended capacity. In addition, there are many communities in which redundant services are offered by several social service agencies, and where these, in combination, constitute "competition" for the patronage that would otherwise be dependent upon the local municipal public transport systems. Clearly, such duplication of service causes inefficient use of fuel, adds unnecessary pollution, and wastes dollars that might provide better transport service to more people if coordination were required. Part of the problem is organizational, in that transportation services to health care centers may be financed by health care budgets, while dollars for veterans' programs may finance transport to veteransâ programs. There is presently little reason for the administrator of one program to even be concerned with the characteristics of the other. Through such examples I hope that I have shown that transporta- tion system management has not yet been achieved or, for that matter, even attempted on a truly significant scale. Ramp metering on free- ways is part of a management program, but if we stop at such projects without coming to grips with larger, institutional, and programmatic issues, we will not really be meeting the challenge of transportation systems management. Transportation system management requires coordination of the programs of many governmental units not originally created with the purposes of such programs in mind. Appropriate roles for various units and levels of government are not obvious and are in need of study. With bonds being strengthened between metropolitan authorities and federal officials in the area of transit planning and finance, and with estab- lished ties between federal and state bureaucracies in the highway area declining in importance, a key question involves the role of the States in multi-modal planning and management. We may also ask: How will the local shares for capital requirements be raised? What is the role of various jurisdictions in the provision of operating subsidies? Should paratransit and supple- mentary transit be provided by the private market, by traditional transit institutions, or by totally new mechanisms? What impacts are labor agreements likely to have on transit operations during the coming decade? University research could contribute directly to the design of new organizational arrangements for the provision, operation, and financing of expanded multi-modal transportation systems in urban areas, in response to such critical questions. As I read proposals for new transit systems in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and as I look at the results of recent investments in BART in San Francisco, METRO in Washington, D.C., and other systems, I am struck by the lack of balance between considerations related to the financing of the capital investment and the stream of operating costs which will occur in later years. We have emphasized the former, and, 34
clearly, we have been relatively shortsighted by virtue of the fact that we have not given detailed consideration to the public burdens of financing the operations of transit systems and highway systems as they age. An increasing concern for the financial aspects of system opera- tion must parallel concerns for transportation system management. This is a fertile field for university research, and the need for such research is enormous. How can we predict operating and main- tenance costs for transportation systems, and how can we finance these costs? The mechanisms which our society has chosen so far for bearing such costs -- reliance upon fares, general funds, and property and sales taxes -- are not even fully understood. Some of our financing mechanisms tend to place the burden for supporting transportation systems upon non-users while others place the burdens upon users. Some systems have been planned so as to provide higher service levels to the rich while being financed in such a way as to have the cost burden fall upon the poor. I believe that the next decade should see a great deal of research on these distributional aspects of transport system finance. Case studies of existing financial mechanisms and their impacts are in order, along with estimates of the impacts of still untried system finance strategies. University research can be extremely important in this area, because we do not have adequate criteria by which to measure the value of society of alternative transportation financing schemes. We are all concerned about equity -- about distributing the burden for transportation system support in socially desirable ways -- but we do not have adequate criteria for the measurement of equity in system finance, or even for the measurement of equity in service delivery. We have not formulated any really clear objectives by which we can identify appropriate roles in system finance for private enter- prise, for state and local governments, and for the federal govern- ment, and certainly I have not addressed the manner in which these various roles should be articulated. I advocate much greater atten- tion to these issues in federally supported research programs during the coming decade, and I believe universities have an especially im- portant contribution to make to such research. For 30 years, economists have been developing theoretical arguments for congestion tolls, marginal cost pricing, and for cutting peak-hour demand through pricing strategies. Very few practical appli- cations were ever tried on a major scale, however, and such strategies were assumed, perhaps too hastily, to be politically unimplementable. Isn't the situation really changing, however? For environmental reasons, EPA's "transportation control strategies" proposed a large- scale auto-disincentive program. Such programs are also coming into good currency as a means of conserving energy. When I talk about transportation system management and about the development of new 35
strategies for financing the operations of our systems, I must include auto-disincentives as a prime ingredient of both of these. I believe, for example, that over time we will find the newer heavy-rail networks to be financially untenable in the absence of pricing schemes that provide for operating subsidies and also encourage auto users to shift to use those systems. Judicious use of parking charges and other forms of user tolls can raise revenue for transit operations and also encourage transit use. Pressures are already mounting for such strategies, and I believe they will continue to mount during the next decade. The existing theoretical literature on this subject should now be supplemented by more applied studies to enable us to make wiser operational choices of disincentives as part of system management and financial planning. To do this, we need improvements in such analytical tools as demand models. We need a better understanding of consumer responses to disincentives. We need more penetrating analyses of the role of disincentives in the political arena and of the role of disin- centives in system operation. This should be a major focus for university research during the coming decade. Although attention for the moment centers upon near-term management and low-capital solutions to our transportation problems, we may soon be returning to an era of long-range planning and, indeed, to a new form of comprehensive planning. In retrospect, the comprehensive planning of the 1950's now seems rather uncomprehensive, even short- sighted. While we, in 1976, are collectively less willing than planners in 1956 to make firm predictions for the next 30 years, we will be forced by limited resources and by environmental imperatives to jointly recon- sider urban forms, transportation systems, energy consumption patterns, and the quality of life. Together, these considerations will lead to a new form of comprehensive planning -- more enlightened, let us hope, than the so-called comprehensiveness of the 1950's and 1960's. University researchers can help to prepare for this in many ways. We really know much less about the interrelationships between transpor- tation and urban form than we think we do. In Los Angeles, for example, those who currently favor the building of a rail transit system argue rather forcefully that the system will cause a concentration of dense development in areas served by the system, and that this will bring about efficient uses of energy and a net diminution of tripmaking. Others, who oppose the investment in such a capital intensive systen, insist that it will foster suburban development beyond the ends of the lines in each corridor, and thereby cause a net increase in low-density, energy-inefficient suburbs. It seems to me that either view could be correct, depending upon how we choose to exercise land use controls or how we price the services and finance them. 36
The implications of these observations for research programs are fuzzy, but there certainly are some. Perhaps we should be explicitly studying the history of urban development of the last 100 years, and the role of transportation, energy, and the urban economy during this period. We should be evaluating today the results of the comprehensive plans of the 1950's and 1960's in terms of their own objectives, and examining in retrospect the objectives of those plans in order to understand where and why they succeeded and where and why they failed. We should be developing new forms of transportation/land use plans and controls to serve the demands of the new comprehensiveness that lies before us. We should examine today's federal and state land use and transportation policy in efforts to understand the directions in which they will turn in the next several decades. Because of the long-term and speculative nature of such studies, universities may be much better qualified than others to do research of this sort. Such studies may make very important contributions to the quality of life in the future. As a university researcher who has watched the Department of Transportation (DOT) set its research priorities principally from the outside, I'd like to offer one personal comment on the style of federal support programs for university research. During the coming decade, I would personally give much lower priority than in past years to the explicit fostering of "multidisciplinary" research by the Office of University Research. In focusing upon particular problems and issues, multidisciplinary teams may be essential in order to complete an intel- ligent analysis and bring about useful results. For other problems, however, multidisciplinary studies might not be necessary. By consis- tently emphasizing the desirability of multidisciplinary terms, DOT has invested a great deal of money in projects for which the major product has been mutual adjustment among colleagues, rather than useable research. Teambuilding, in itself, has no ultimate value to DOT, and often the processes of multidisciplinary teambuilding are so inefficient that they constitute the principal output of multidisciplinary research. Em- phasis should be placed by federal authorities upon the expected out- puts of the research, rather than upon the mechanisms that universities should adopt in achieving those outputs. Multidisciplinary research should be proposed where it has an expected payoff, not as an end in itself for which federal dollars will be more easily attained than for research in more traditional settings. 37
