TECHNOLOGICAL FORECASTING AND SOCIAL CHANGE 45, 11 l-l 17 (1994)

ISSUES PAPER
#ll

Adaptability and Flexibility in Urban

Transportation Policy and Planning

JONATHAN L. GIFFORD

ABSTRACT

The poor representation of uncertainty in the urban transportation planning process can lead to excessively
large and permanent facilities. Such inflexible facilities and systems may condition and severely constrain options
available to future generations for organizing the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and
services. The relationship between facility size and permanence and flexibility has received too little recognition
in practice and too little attention in research. This paper calls for increased research to provide policy makers
and practitioners with a greater understanding of the consequences of the present approach and the advantages
and disadvantages of more flexible approaches.

Introduction
In his history of city building since the early Middle Ages, Josef Konvitz [ 11 observes
that “[bluilding too much too well has produced cities with many prematurely obsolete
structures and districts that conform to patterns which have been superseded by technolog-
ical change.” Especially in the twentieth century, he argues, city builders have focused
on the city as an object of design. In earlier times, the city was a byproduct of social
and economic activity, relying on vernacular architecture and transient structures and
districts that could be modified as social, economic, environmental, and technological
conditions evolved [2].
Konvitz’s argument poses a challenge for the planning of cities and their infrastructure
systems. Most city planning focuses closely on the city as an object of design, and its
origins in the City Beautiful and other nineteenth-century reform movements are part
of the canon taught to every planning student. Infrastructure planners from the civil
engineering tradition focus on planning over horizons that derive more from the longevity

Dr. GIFFORD is an assistant professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs and a research
fellow in The Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University, He received his Ph.D. in transportation
engineering with minors in city and regional planning and economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
The current article draws on his book Flexible Urban 7iunsporation Systems, currently in progress.
Address reprint requests to Professor Jonathan L. Gifford, Department of Public and International Affairs,
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030.

0 1994 Elsevier Science Inc. OO40-1625/94/$7.00

112 J.L. GIFFORD

of engineering materials than from a facility’s functional service life, the assumption
being that facilities will be useful for as long as they last. It is a grave matter if infrastructure
planners are engaged in the design of facilities that will be poorly suited to future condi-
tions and may impoverish future generations with the cost of maintaining them.
Central to this challenge is the issue of uncertainty. How much uncertainty is there
about future conditions? If uncertainty is great, the rational policy is to avoid irreversible
decisions, maintain flexibility, and collect good intelligence. If uncertainty is modest, the
rational policy is to design to achieve long-run economies of scale [3].
The scope of this challenge encompasses the whole range of urban infrastructure
systems-sewer, water, transportation-and services-schools, police, fire prevention. Its
thorough investigation should entail extensive empirical studies in a variety of functional
planning areas to understand the trade-offs between long-term operating efficiencies and
short-run flexibility. The goal of this paper is much more modest: to consider Konvitz’s
ideas in the context of urban transportation planning, and to identify research areas that
can inform policy and public debate.
The paper examines the representation of uncertainty in urban transportation plan-
ning and the relationship between uncertainty representation and facility size and longev-
ity. Comments follow on the possible impact of these conditions on the adaptability and
flexibility of urban transportation systems in the face of unpredictable social, environmen-
tal, economic, and technological conditions, and avenues for future research.

The Extent of Uncertainty

Uncertainty is pervasive in the urban transportation planning problem domain. The
present and historical distribution of demand, for example, while observable in the field,
is not well documented in most urban areas. The high cost of data collection leads planners
to rely on heavily massaged and derived data sources, which themselves introduce uncer-
tainty into the planning and decision making process. Future conditions are uncertain
because they are inherently random [4]. The future distribution of transportation demand
with respect to location, time of day, purpose, mode, and vehicle size and weight are
highly uncertain. Uncertainty also resides in the future location and characteristics of
transportation facilities and services. The delivery of transportation facilities and services
depends on a complex and fragmented set of institutions, each facing its own uncertainties
and exigencies about the availability of funds, the willingness of elected officials to support
particular facilities, and the public’s willingness to allow construction to proceed. Thus,
planned facilities may never be built, or may be built to radically modified designs and
characteristics of service.

The Representation of Uncertainty

The treatment of uncertainty in the urban transportation planning process has long
been a concern. One account [5] finds its origins in the economic literature of the 1960s
concerned with demand uncertainty for publicly provided goods [6]. In the 1960s and
197Os, concern over uncertainty in transportation planning continued in the work of,
among others, Manheim [7-91. The World Conference on Transportation Research took
that topic as its theme in 1977 [lo].
The regional transportation planning process in the U.S. does recognize that uncer-
tainties exist, and attempts to account for them at some level. Best practice suggests the
development of regional scenarios, perhaps five or six, that capture at least broadly the
likely range of future conditions (e.g., see [l 11). Scenarios attempt to capture possible
or likely futures with respect to broad, largely exogenous forces such as economic growth,
labor force participation rates, and economic structure. For each scenario, a plan is
produced.
FLEXIBILITY IN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING 113

While scenarios capture-at least crudely - uncertainty about largely exogenous fac-
tors, much deeper and more pervasive uncertainties are invisible in the planning process.
The process is extremely data intensive. It requires, among other things, zonal distribu-
tions of population and employment, trip generation rates, land use plans and restrictions,
preferences of elected officials, and estimates of community acceptance of particular
facilities.
These data inputs are each uncertain. Elected officials change, often on a very short
cycle, bringing modified or even reversed political interests to bear. Comprehensive plans
are revised less often, but often dramatically, thereby changing specified levels of zonal
employment, population, and traffic generation. A community’s preferences and willing-
ness to accept the construction or expansion of particular facilities also varies unpredict-
ably over time, as does its willingness to provide operating subsidies for public transit.
Moreover, the current and historical data on which future estimates are based are
themselves generally derived from infrequent-sometimes very infrequent-surveys and
measurements of transportation behavior. Traffic surveys that form the foundation of
the future estimates are often a decade or more out of date. They are adjusted and
modified to reflect current conditions, to be sure. But these adjustments themselves intro-
duce additional error. Also, trip generation rates vary significantly within and among
regions; yet the cost of data collection, and the time required to assemble and synthesize
it, generally preclude the collection of new, accurate data.
Despite concern over the treatment of uncertainty, there is no systematic body of
data indicating how uncertainty is treated in practice in the field of transportation plan-
ning. Some anecdotal evidence is suggestive, however. Federal regulations stipulate fairly
uniform planning procedures as conditions of federal grants, and the traditional regional
transportation planning approach has been common to most metropolitan transportation
planning activities in the U.S. since the late 1960s (see [12]).

The Impacts of Poor Uncertainty Representation

Given the extent of uncertainty in urban transportation planning and its poor repre-
sentation in the decision process, what are the likely impacts on the design of transporta-
tion facilities?
Theory clearly shows that ignoring risk about future conditions leads to the specifica-
tion of larger projects or facilities [13-161. Pearman summarizes the argument well:
“[i]n a dynamic decision making environment where knowledge increases over time, [if]
irreversible projects with uncertain streams of returns are compared in terms only of
their expected values as viewed at the present [i.e., if uncertainty about future conditions
is ignored], there will be a significant tendency for such irreversible decisions to be taken
prematurely” (ref. [5], p. 432). Furthermore, ignoring demand uncertainty can lead to
upward biases of optimal capacity estimates, even in the presence of significant economies
of scale such as are exhibited in the case of water supply [17, 181.
Some analyses of the traditional four-step planning process suggest that the assign-
ment step-where zone-to-zone travel is assigned to specific routes-is relatively robust
with respect to errors in the earlier stages of trip generation and distribution due to the
aggregative nature of the assignment process, as long as the average trip length remains
constant. That is, even relatively large errors in the estimation of spatial demand distribu-
tions essentially “net out” in the assignment process as long as the average trip distribution
does not change. According to this argument, uncertainty about future spatial demand
distributions should not undermine confidence in the traditional approach, since even
rather different distributions yield quite similar route assignments [ 19-221.
While these analyses are reassuring, their limitations are not completely benign, as
Chang 1221has acknowledged. First, the aggregative nature of the assignment process -
114 J.L. GIFFORD

that is, the fact that all metropolitan travel shares the same network of facilities-is
contingent upon the density of the network under consideration. The denser the network
being considered, the less aggregative the assignment process, and-one expects-the
more sensitive it will be to variations in travel distribution. For example, in the degenerate
case of a linear city, where all travel occurs along portions of a single highway, one can
easily imagine that aggregate levels of travel on that highway would be somewhat insensi-
tive to minute variations of zone-to-zone travel demand. At the opposite extreme, on a
network that provided a separate facility for travel between each zone pair-that is, a
completely nonaggregative network-travel on each link would obviously be highly sensi-
tive to the demand for travel between its associated zones.
A second limiting assumption is that assignments do not vary much as long as average
trip lengths remain the same. Again, this has some intuitive appeal as long as average
trip lengths are large relative to the size of the metropolitan region. As trip lengths decline,
however, one would expect the assignment to become increasingly sensitive to variations
in spatial distribution. Consider the extreme case where average trip lengths are much
smaller than the dimension of a single zone, suggesting that most trips occur within one
zone. One can easily imagine sets of travel distributions having such an average trip length
that would give rise to rather different traffic assignments. Moreover, recent analyses have
confirmed the continuing decline in average trip lengths in major metropolitan areas
[23, 241.
In the context of uncertainty representation and its effect on facility size, the tradi-
tional process would appear to provide unbiased guidance only under fairly tightly con-
strained conditions, namely, a sparse network of major arterial highways. If a broader
range of network configurations is brought into consideration, the traditional process
would appear to be subject to the biases for premature project constuction and for facility
oversizing introduced earlier. Failure to consider uncertainty about future conditions can
lead to premature deployment and oversizing of facilities. Conditions under which the
traditional process “nets out” these uncertainties in the assignment process appear to be
limited in their applicability.

Implications for Urban Transportation Planning

Consider the implications of poor uncertainty representation for urban transporta-
tion planning. Konvitz’s original observation was that cities are too durable. The foregoing
discussion has introduced a logical connection between durability and uncertainty in the
decision process, drawn from the economic and policy literatures.
This reasoning suggests that, ceteris paribus, if uncertainty were accurately repre-
sented in the urban transportation planning process, projects would generally be smaller
with shorter design lives. But how do these general observations apply to urban transporta-
tion particularly? Do they imply building “disposable highways” or, for that matter,
“disposable cities,” and all that implies about resource utilization and sustainability? If
uncertainty militates against designing and building for the long term, what is the appro-
priate role for the transportation planner?
Elected decision makers tend towards relatively short time horizons: the next election,
typically two to four years. Not all operate on such short horizons, of course, but the
incentive structure is not designed to focus on the long term. Planning agencies, through
comprehensive planning among other techniques, attempt to insert a longer-term focus
into the decision process. But comprehensive plans and zoning laws to enforce them must
be adopted by elected officials, thus subjecting them to the short-term orientation of
elected officials as well. Further diluting concerns for the long term are zoning variance
FLEXIBILITY IN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING 115

requests, which may act as a loophole for developments that are inconsistent with the
official long-term view. Thus, the urban planner and the urban transportation planner
are mightily pressed to respond to the challenges of the present.
Comprehensive plans and transportation plans provide a bulwark for resisting exclu-
sive attention to the here and now. Yet these plans rely for their legitimacy on subjective
norms that may not stand up well over time; that is, they may themselves be of uncertain
validity. Consider, for example, the separation of land uses, long a cardinal principle
of urban planning, now largely debunked. This norm has had enormous influence on
the development of American cities, so that the land use patterns in many cities bear a
strong imprint of an obsolete planning norm that constrains their ability to adapt to
contemporary conditions. A current favorite in some circles is jobs-housing balance,
whereby housing and commercial land uses are located in close proximity, in direct contra-
vention of the previous norm of separation.
While not without merit, such objectives do not incorporate a desire to preserve
options in the face of uncertain future conditions. On the contrary, they aim for a specific
set of solutions that make sense in terms of currently perceived problems and opportuni-
ties. They act to reduce uncertainty by foreclosing options. Separation of land uses, for
example, protects a subdivision from incompatible uses on adjacent parcels, thereby
providing security to the homeowner. But the price of that security is a loss in flexibility
that does not appear in the decision process.
Thus, uncertainty can be mitigated by constraining future options and giving stake-
holders property rights over those options. Long-term concerns about flexibility and
adaptability of the city to inherently random future economic, social, environmental,
and technological conditions and opportunities receive little recognition in the decision
process. All parties operate under an illusion that the future is knowable and controllable,
and that the important thing is to protect and advance their own interests. The challenge
in planning, then, is how to mediate between the short-term exigencies of democratic
pluralism and the longer-term, but questionable, norms of planning.
An alternative approach would focus on postponing irreversible decisions as long
as possible and keeping their scale to a minimum, identifying and preserving options,
and collecting good intelligence. This is a markedly different approach to planning,
whether urban planning generally or transportation planning particularly.
Does this approach imply disposable highways or disposable cities? It does insofar
as it sees each project or facility as serving only transient purposes. On the other hand,
it is resource conserving insofar as facilities would use no more of a resource than required
to serve near-term and relatively certain demand, with the potential of being superseded
or replaced later. The replacement would presumably be designed to meet contemporary
social, economic, environmental, and technological conditions.
Such an approach is at odds with other players in the urban development game who
are generally not willing to invest until government has made an irrevocable commitment,
be it to a road for access or a zoning law for controlling adjacent uses. Homeowners,
developers, and banks would surely question government “flexibility” with respect to the
provision of public facilities and services and land use restrictions. Moreover, forces for
reform of current problems are pressing for less flexibility, not more, in the form of
adequate public facility ordinances and growth management (see, e.g., [25-281).

Concluding Remarks and Research Recommendations

The poor representation of uncertainty and its impact on project scale and durability
raise important questions that deserve serious consideration by those who plan and build
116 J.L. GIFFORD

our cities and their transportation systems. Together, these considerations call for more
flexibility in the planning and development of urban transportation infrastructure.
Yet while concerns about flexibility in urban transportation infrastructure may be
in order, the unanswered question is how such flexibility might actually be incorporated
into an ongoing infrastructure planning and development program, or might replace an
ongoing infrastructure program with something that is much more attuned to flexibility;
for it may be the case that more radical change than can be achieved by mere fine-tuning
of existing programs is in order.
Consider that urban infrastructure planning in the U.S. and, to a large extent, in
the developed nations of the world, derives from Renaissance and nineteenth century
assumptions about the existence of an underlying order to the universe, whose revelation
through scientific observation and study was the task of engineers and planners. As long
as the engineer sought to reveal an externally defined order, a divinely inspired order
in many views, then there was no need to question the legitimacy and desirability of
that order.
But contemporary philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists tell us increasingly
that much of the apparent order we observe in everyday life is in fact merely transitory,
the occurrence of fairly predictable behavior between aperiodic “structural changes” or
“bifurcations” in complex processes whose long-term trajectories are difficult to predict.
Herein lies a research challenge to the infrastructure planning community. What sorts
of change in planning institutions and processes, whether radical or incremental, are
available to policy makers, and what are their merits?
It may be the case that while inflexibility imposes social costs, in fact those costs
are outweighed by the benefits that flow from the investments. Yet how are we to make
that calculation, especially in light of the fact that the very estimates of costs and benefits
upon which such an assessment would be based are themselves forecasted values that
are highly uncertain and subject to heroic assumptions about the nature of future techno-
logical opportunities, environmental constraints, economic conditions, and social prefer-
ences? To what extent are systems and facilities developed using voluntary investment
rather than compulsory taxation more or less flexible?
Of course, it is appropriate to attempt to use infrastructure to establish an ordered
environment in which households and firms can attend to other concerns, if the order
so established is one that facilitates well being. But how is that to be determined, and
by whom? That is the central question; through government and collective action, through
private, voluntary action, or in what combination of public and private action?
These fundamental questions have received far too little attention in research on
infrastructure policy and planning. Yet they are important, and further, not impossible
to research. Comparative infrastructure planning and management can examine the merits
of various approaches, across national and continental boundaries as well as across vari-
ous technologies. Yet with few exceptions, little research has focused on this issue. Varia-
tions in the flexibility and adaptability of alternative planning and management ap-
proaches may be difficult. But variations, even in the U.S. context, are certainly available:
federal provision of service (air traffic control and waterway); federal capital aid to states
and localities (wastewater treatment, transit new starts, and highways); regulated private
utility (pipeline, telecommunications). As society examines the merits of improvements
in existing systems (such as intelligent vehicle highway systems) and the deployment of
new systems (such as maglev and the “information superhighway”), such research can
inform-and should inform-decisions about the institutional and technical nature of
planning and development activities.
FLEXIBILITY IN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING 117

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Received 29 March 1993; revised 2 August 1993