Bad Faith Planning and Its Impact on Transit
A big chunk of why transit costs are high and the risk of politicization is also high.
One of the most eye opening things I learned about public transit when I moved to Toronto in the mid 2010s was not only how political the processes of building and planning it was, but the universal bending of the truth that happened in relation to various transportation projects.
To be clear, transit planning — and more broadly transportation planning — is always political, even when it’s not *formally* so. And in some sense that is a good thing: we live in a democracy. But the way that plays out in Toronto is especially noteworthy, and in today’s post I want to talk about some of the things I have seen come from and fuel this politicization.
The first thing to understand (and it is often not appreciated) is that few transportation questions have “right” answers.
The obvious example of this that many Torontonians (and perhaps even beyond the city) would be familiar with was mayor Rob Ford’s “Subways! Subways! Subways!” obsession that seemed centered more on getting transit out of the way of drivers than on providing good transit. The issue I see here is that it seems many took Rob Ford’s craziness and the zeal for getting streetcars out of the way of cars as a sign that the subways that he supported were somehow actively bad, even though it’s long been clear that Toronto needed at least a few more lines to fill out its network. Unfortunately though, Rob Ford probably didn’t or at least couldn’t articulate many good reasons to build subways, or have a higher level of conversation about them, and this sort of killed the conversation about building rapid transit for a decade in Canada’s largest city, during a time of unprecedented growth.
Now, while few will disagree with me that Ford could not articulate or really explain a clear plan for how or why we would build his transit plan, I see many of the same problems with the Transit City plan later released by Former Mayor David Miller, despite how often its “cancellation” has been lamented by urbanists.
You see, Transit City as a plan had many serious issues. For one, unlike Ford’s plan, it did not elevate the “Relief” Line from Pape to Downtown to top priority level (the project had been seen as critical for decades) — in fact, the plan didn’t include it at all. Instead, it intended on building a LRT (read: tram) line north from Don Mills and Eglinton that would break up a future north-south journey through the east end in the same way the Sheppard East LRT would on Sheppard, forcing riders travelling along a well defined corridor to transfer in the middle of their journey to keep travelling in the same direction. The plan also elevated the “more is better” ideology I have spoken out against in a recent video, that sees all “transit” as the same and simply aims to build as much of some preferred mode as possible. This is just as bad a reason to build transit (trying to send rail lines - regardless of speed through more neighbourhoods) as to get other transit out of the way of drivers - even if the reasons why are slightly more obscure.
In any case, discussions of these two possible “plans” were often just as painful as the plans themselves, and that’s because so much of that discussion was based on the presumption that there are “correct” solutions and infallible empirical evidence to support them. I’d often hear people accusing others of denying “reality” that was written into various transit studies, but unfortunately, even the best transit studies do not say anything with complete certainty.
The reality is cities are chaotic systems, the we are very bad at predicting their change.
A good example of this might be a traffic study that suggests a light rail line will hugely impact car travel times, or another study that suggests transit ridership is “insufficient” for a subway. Such studies might have both been referenced by people on either side of the above mentioned debate, but both suffer from the same fundamental issues. They probably make rather arbitrary assumptions, often use models based on bad data, and fail to consider the broader impact that changes can have.
For example, a model trained on American data (American local transit is bad, and rapid transit ridership is broadly weak) is likely to say that many subway and other transit projects in Toronto are weak (this applies to stuff we already have that we know performs well!), and we absolutely have used such models in the past! We know these are problems, everyone will acknowledge it under the right circumstances — but a desire to see something built or a political horse in the race is sufficient to look fast that. And to be clear, this applies across the political spectrum. Note that the project with the *most* consensus and evidence behind the need for it — the Downtown Relief Line, is just starting construction now in *2023*.
Where this interacts with politics or even just personal or cultural preferences is where “bad faith planning” (as I’ll call it) referenced in the title enters the picture.
I see bad faith planning as being the production of reports, models, and plans that fundamentally mirror one’s underlying assumptions, in the transportation planning equivalent of confirmation bias. A big problem with the systems that we use to deem which transport projects are worth building is that they see an increasing number of output metrics being pushed into them, and a broader and broader scope for assumption making. This makes it very easy to miss or even hide what are fundamentally bad, unrealistic, or unfavourable assumptions in a study that nudges things in a certain direction.
These methods often take the form of “soft” assumptions that are hard for the average person to see through — for example, suggesting an elevated station needs to straddle and intersection and have staircases on all four corners (like on the century old Chicago El), as seen in studies that considered elevating the Eglinton West LRT, or defining “subway” to mean wide 150-metre trains — which isn’t actually a reasonable definition of that category of transit, but does have the impact of making everything look more expensive by default than assuming 80 or 100-metre trains used in cities around the world.
This can also come through in the way studies are laid out, for example making an ambiguous table with dots of different colours (Harvey balls) to represent qualitative qualities of different proposals, without providing a clear rationale on how results were arrived at. And to be clear, it’s not even always so visually obvious that a black box was at work delivering some conclusion!
The issue with this is that if planners (or whomever is producing the studies) determine that they do or do not like a certain option, it is incredibly easy to “sandbag” a study one way or another. Transportation is so multidimensional that there are an unlimited number of technical challenges or walls that can be put up in front of a project that doesn’t have buy-in even from unelected officials. It’s always possible to derail things by making an unrealistic assumption or bringing in a tangential concern that forces a repeated re-litigation of a project or even just an element of a project that can often kill it.
Essentially, bad faith planning can be simplified as some actor directing a planner or group of planners or even just any random person involved in the planning process to study or consider something. That person then determines an interpretation of the actors request that aligns with some internal or external preference (a lot of the time there is high-level pressure to head in a certain direction). In the worst case, this leads to a dismissal of the initial idea, and in the best case, the person can then find a new “bad faith” interpretation and the process repeats itself.
Now, you might think the actor making the request could simply say what assumptions to make and constraints to consider but, that essentially means they are doing the study themselves — making this completely impractical.
What’s more concerning is the second-order effect of a study being done with bad faith planning, and then outside actors with the same general alignment picking that up and running with it. A lot of these issues can actually be fought by asking for evidence, assumptions, and comparables (for which one can make a judgement regarding their relevance), but a good question to ask is “Is there actually a way to protect the process from this?”. I think that’s obviously an extremely hard question, but I do have some ideas which I’ll discuss in a future post.