Randal O’Toole has published an excellent new study through the Cato Institute on metrpolitan planning called “Roadmap to Gridlock“. It should be a must read for free market people as well as professional planners. I just posted an extensive review at Planetizen.com here. A highlight? Quoting Randal:
“No plan did sensitivity analyses of critical assumptions. None bothered to project potential benefits or cost-effectiveness or projects considered. All but a handful of plans failed to include any realistic alternatives, and many failed to project the effects of the proposed plan on transportation. As a result, plans lacked transparency: taxpayers and other readers of most plans would have no idea how to projects were selected, whether those projects or the plans themselves were cost effective at meeting plan goals, or even, in many cases, whether the plans met any goals.”