Thank you for your kind introduction. It is truly an honour to be before this August body on so auspicious an occasion as the School's 25th anniversary, to discuss the changes that have occurred in the planning profession over the last quarter century, and the prospects for the next.

When this School was founded in 1970, the world was in the grip of a planning euphoria. Keynesian economics dominated public policy thinking, and when I say dominated, that is, if anything, an understatement. Keynes and the discipline of macroeconomics that his theories spawned had shown how society could be reduced to a handful of levers that could be jigged and rejigged to obtain specific results. Pull a bit on the public spending lever and unemployment would go up; raise interest rates and an overheated economy cools down.

In Keynesian economics, the greater good was calculated, or estimated, or modelled, and then this greater good was pursued. If some had to suffer in the cause, well, as Keynesians always said, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Keysian economics was all about gross approximations, followed by fine-tuning. The gross approximators were the new macro-economists, and the fine-tuners a new breed of planners. Planners, as always, were idealists, reformers, agents of social change. Together, and operating with a mandate from society at large, this duo would bring us to the New Jerusalem.

Internationally, planners at the World Bank were given the mission of saving the Third World. Keynes, in fact, had been a chief architect of the World Bank. The Marshall Plan had been a hit, credited with successfully rebuilding Europe after World War Two; now the World Bank would turn that same expertise to developing Africa, Asia, and South and Central America.

In Canada, planners set about remaking our industrial sector. At the provincial level, major electricity sectors were nationalized, not out of ideology but from a sense that the private sector had too narrow a focus, and didn't understand the bigger picture. In Quebec and BC, politicians like Rene Levesque and Wacky Bennett were driven to their wits' end by their provinces' small-minded private power companies, who refused to go along with the governments' enlightened plans for massive dam-building, with all their multiplier effects.

At the municipal level, regional governments had taken over numerous functions from the petty, local politics that had gotten in the way of efficient development. Petty ward-level politics was giving way to metro-wide coordination of services. The interests of suburbs and cities were now being balanced, and in 1970--the year this School was founded-- the experiment seemed to be proceeding apace, despite the odd miscue along the way. The greater good was the object, always. Always, to make those omelettes, eggs would inevitably need to be broken.

THAT WAS THEN. IT WILL COME AS A SHOCK to no one in this room that planning is no longer the uncontroversial, Mom & Apple Pie profession of yesteryear. Much planning has failed, and failed abysmally. Low-density suburbs are now generally seen as part of the problem, and urban densification as a panacea. Canadian crown corporations are now seen as enormously wasteful and polluting throwbacks, and every crown is now a candidate for privatization. We have lost our enthusiasm for Third World planning, after all the razed forests, redirected rivers, and displaced populations that caused mayhem to Third World economies.

Some point to the disasters as proof that more comprehensive planning is needed--longer-term planning, or larger-scale planning, to encompass more of the variables. The suburbs are fine, even desirable, some planners argue. The real problem is the automobile, which has been allowed to get too big, and too polluting, and too unsafe.

Force the auto manufacturers to produce smaller, cleaner, safer cars, say some proponents of more planning, and the suburb's supposed drawbacks disappear.

But mostly, critics of current planning say we have too much planning, and this is the view currently in vogue. When Mike Harris or Ralph Klein or Preston Manning or Newt Gingrich say we have too much government interference in our lives, they are saying we are overplanned. They are saying that too many decisions affecting us in our daily lives are being made remotely. And although they don't generally mention planners, when they point to federal or provincial capitals as the source of the problem, you and I know that it is planners they are referring to.

Somehow, planners have been manoeuvred -- or they've manoeuvred themselves --into being the outsiders, the bureaucrats who prod us in this or that direction to get us to do things we wouldn't ordinarily do. Somehow, planners have become identified with John Maynard Keynes and the heavy hand of state intervention.

And this identification, in my view, has discredited planning, and obfuscated its nature. Planning, after all, is non-ideological, or, rather, all-ideological. We all plan. Planning is a necessity to almost everything, because almost everything has constraints, and the way we deal with constraints is to plan around them.

This applies to financial planning as much as to urban or regional planning, to family planning as much as to transportation or energy planning.

We are obsessed by constraints, and reward anyone who can minimize or eliminate the constraint altogether. And we punish anyone who creates more constraints for us.

Put another way, a primary goal of human endeavour is to simply or eliminate planning. Seen in this light, the VCRs on our TV sets are anti-planning devices. With VCRs, people no longer need to plan their weeks around their favourite shows...they can tape them and go out for dinner, and then watch the show when they come home. To reduce TV planning even further, VCRs have become more sophisticated, and more sophisticated.

But VCRs still take some planning -- you've got to plan to tape your shows. To eliminate even this level of planning, in future video on demand will allow you to select whatever you want, whenever you want. TV planning will have been eradicated.

Birth control devices are also anti-planning devices -- they remove the constraint of the rhythm method by offering the Pill, IUDs, and sterilization as methods to minimize the need to plan. Because these methods continue to require some planning, the search goes on: now scientists and pharmaceutical companies are developing immunization shots against pregnancy. Instead of taking a pill daily, you'll only need a booster every 6 months, someday, maybe, every 6 years.

Planners are in the business of managing constraints or, better by far, where possible eliminating the constraint altogether. The plans are not ends in themselves, but means to this end of eliminating constraints. Planners who forget this do so at their peril.

LIKE THIS SCHOOL, during the last quarter century I have devoted myself to understanding planning. I started with an interest in corporate planning, and then added an interest in government planning. I took my education abroad, where the understanding was deepest, to the land of the master planners, the Soviet Union. This was before Perestroika, when the country was largely closed to visitors except for a very few days in a very few cities, and then under very controlled conditions. In those days, knowledgable people could cite the marvellous accomplishments of Communism without blushing--full employment, universal medical care, housing and education for all, low infant mortality, low inflation--this planned economy may have had missteps, but few doubted that the backward, illiterate country that the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 would have developed so successfully without socialism. The USSR Pavilion at Expo 67, the World ‘s Fair, which some of you might have visited, was a testament to the accomplishments of modern socialism.

Sure, the Soviets had to crack a few eggs, but poverty and unemployment were unknown, everyone was housed and fed. Planning provided irrefutable benefits in this closed society.

Then, for a brief period in the 1970s--perhaps a year or two---the Soviets for some reason decided to open up the country to independent travel. And for a couple of months, I was able to see the fruits of their planners' labours-- the omelette you get when you put all your eggs in one basket ... . and crack them all at once.

I was travelling through Siberia slowly by train--the Orient Express--from the USSR's Pacific coast toward Europe, and so I was able to get a glimpse of many communities through the train window.

Travelling at night, I saw electric lights--every hamlet throughout Siberia was electrified -- this was the gift of planning. Those familiar with international development have seen the statistics--the percent of household electrified. On this basis, the USSR could boast as high a level of development as the US or Canada. That was Siberia by night. But by day, it was evident that I was travelling through a vast, impoverished land--the settlements were primitive, what you'd expect from ramshackle Third World villages, only without the colour, without the spontaneity and vibrancy.

The Soviets decreed that there would be light, and there was. But the electricity short-circuited development elsewhere in the economy. In major Siberian cities, with populations of one and two million people, a 5 minute walk from the built-up centre of the city took you to residential areas without running water -- people carried their water home in buckets. These homes had electricity, but the water was still being pumped by hand and lugged home by bucket. The society was allocating resources by fiat -- deciding on a political basis which sectors had priorities, and then feeding those sectors while starving others they viewed as less important.

A variant of that practise was evident in the Soviet's management of the train system. When you disembark at a major city, the arrival time is as likely to be 3:00 a.m. as 3:00 pm. The trains are run to maximize the convenience of the planners at head office, which means making no compromises for the passenger's convenience. Trains maximize their distances travelled and cargo carried -- Soviet transportation planners didn't need to factor in concerns like passenger satisfaction.

So, too, with agricultural efficiency.

I don't want to get too personal, or seem too petty, but each night for two weeks, my dinner came with the same two vegetables, regardless of the restaurant, regardless of the city. I finally asked why, and was matter of factly told. "This is the season for onions and cucumber." The next season, which was just around the corner, would feature peppers and tomatoes. To achieve economies of scale, the state farms and collectives planted just two crops at a time--anything else, they believed, would be wasteful. Agricultural output was measured in gross tonnes and calories, not in customer satisfaction.

When I came back to Canada, I realized that, although much was different, much was also the same. In the Soviet Union, Lenin's picture was everywhere, generally above a waterfall. Industrialization was equated to electrification. No discussion, that was dogma.

Here, the waterfall had been replaced by nuclear reactors, but the message was the same: industrialization was equated with electrification. Very little discussion, particularly by anyone who counted. That was dogma, as much here as there. Anyone questioning nuclear power was treated as a Luddite or an anarchist or worse. But almost no one did. The business community was absolutely cowed--nary a peep from anyone. Even the business press was cowed. I remember an article that a colleague sold to the Financial Post in the late 1970s on the economics of nuclear power. It was accepted by the Post's economics editor. But the business editor would have none of it. My colleague was paid, but the article was killed.

The popular press, too, was cowed back then. The Toronto Star accepted an article from me and then promptly changed its mind. It turned out the editor decided to check its accuracy by sending it to Ontario Hydro. Hydro simply said that it was all wrong, and that was good enough for the Star. They killed it--no interest in even checking out my facts against Hydro's.

Why was everyone cowed? Because here as there, the planners were in charge -- the power sector was a planned sector, which meant no strong competitors existed with independent knowledge, and with a strong interest in promoting an independent point of view. Without independent knowledge, the field was restricted to dogma.

The dogma came from all sides.

One of my best lessons in planning came from a document Energy Probe was preparing for the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning, better known as the Porter Commission. This document, called Energy Planning in a Conserver Society, in its own way, was as heavy handed as anything the Soviet Union produced.

To induce energy conservation, which would soon become another one of society's sacred cows, Energy Probe was proposing a variety of financial incentives -- today we would call them market instruments.

But the drafter of that document wasn't convinced financial incentives would be enough. In case those incentives didn't do the trick, Energy Probe proposed a series of penalties, first light and then progressively severe. As I recall, the document stopped short of calling for capital punishment for failing to turn off the lights, but you get its drift.

MY EXPERIENCES IN THE USSR AND IN CANADA have shown me that there are two types of planning:

First, there are the omelette makers- those happy to break a few eggs in the name of the common good. No omelettes are too big for them; in China, to give a current example, the planners of the Yangtze River Valley are putting the finishing touches on their plans for the gargantuan Three Gorges dam, which will move 1.2 million people from their lands.

These top-down planners use elite opinion to determine value -- no one is asking the opinion of the 1.2 million who will be directly affected, or the opinion of the hundreds of millions who will be indirectly affected. The wise men at the top know what's best.

Canada's top-down planners may make small instead of large omelettes, but they're still prepared to smash a few eggs. Energy Probe in the 1970s was one such example.

John Sewell's Planning Commission is a 1990s example of planners trying to accomplish good things in bad ways: by fiat. Sewell's commission knew what kind of development belonged where, and Sewell was prepared to crack a few eggs to decrease densities here, increase them there.

I'm not from the School of Broken Eggs. My kind of planning says: No broken eggs. Everyone acts voluntarily, or we don't act at all. Planning without breaking eggs does not allow those at the top to make value judgements; the citizenry, through its voluntary actions, determines value.

Let me explain how this would work with some real-life examples.

15 years ago, I had the honour to serve on the City of Toronto Planning Board, and soon realized that most issues that came before us--and the overwhelming majority of the controversial issues that came before us--involved the automobile. The car drove opposition to new senior citizens complexes and to business developments.

On parking, probably the hottest urban planning issue of all, the planning solutions have been nothing if not primitive.

On my street in downtown Toronto, presumably out of a sense of fair play, the street parking used to alternate every month--one month the parking would be on the east side, the next the west, and so on. The result was bedlam once a month, as people forgot to switch and ran out in their bedclothes to avoid getting ticketed. It was worse in winter -- people caught colds. And sometimes the schedule changed because of holidays.

This problem of alternating parking is not limited to my district in Toronto, of course. This problem unites English speaking Canada and French speaking Canada. This problem thrives south of the border. To help out harried homeowners in New York City, an entrepreneur has been publishing something called "The New York City Alternate Side of the Street Parking Calendar" for over a decade. The current edition lists 153 days that vehicles don't have to switch sides.

Canada doesn't have a similar planning aid. But in my area of Toronto, at least, this system of sharing the misery proved unbearable.

Then somebody got a better idea. Parking would be allowed only on one side, the east side. No more switching back and forth. It was a simple solution to the bed clothes problem. But people were still dissatisfied: parking was still unpredictable--you couldn't always count on a nearby parking spot. In fact, you couldn't always count on a spot being available anywhere.

There was a shortage of parking spots, and to get one you had to queue in line, sometimes for 6 months. (Queueing, of course, was a popular Soviet pastime prior to the fall of Communism.) So the City started rationing the use of street parking. Only 1 spot per household -- if you had a nice large extended family, and needed 2 cars, a second spot costs 6 times as much as the first -- about the same cost as renting parking privately. This nudged people to move to houses with garages, or to build one, or to build a parking pad on their front lawns.

But that form of rationing still wasn't enough. So the Commissars at City hall issued a new decree -- anyone with a garage or with parking on his lot was no longer entitled to inexpensive parking on the city street.

So now people with two cars had an extra incentive to build 2-car garages, or 2-car parking pads, or to move to the suburbs.

Due to conundrums like these, people on the west side of the street decided to convert their front lawns to parking pads. The city gave approval readily, because that side wasn't used for parking anymore, and no one objected on parking grounds. And people on the east side, who didn't have parking pads, generally liked the trend, since every new pad meant less competition for spots on the east side of the street.

Ah, but people will never leave well enough alone. The saga continues. Now people on the east side want to put in parking pads, and the street is up in arms. When people park on their front yards, it doesn't free up parking on the street because the driveway is about as wide as the length of a car. So while the front yard parker gains, his neighbours don't. In fact, they lose, because they have a bit less flexibility -- they now have a smaller pool of parking spots to choose from. As each new request for a parking pad appears, it creates not only opposition, but an incentive for others to stop fighting and join the trend. If nothing is done to stop this trend, most people on both sides will be parking on their front yards: we will have cleared cars from the parking lane on the street, and moved them onto front yards. Put another way, we'll be seeing more concrete, and less lawn and garden.

The planners have decided to stop this by a crude form of democracy: the dozen or so neighbours just north and just south of any proposed new parking pad get to vote -- if 25% turn thumbs down, no pad. But no matter which way the vote goes, we have unhappy parkers. Somebody's eggs have to get broken.

There's got to be a better way to do all this and there is. Here's my planning solution for this and other rationing problems. Like most of my solutions, my approach is pre-Keynesian and very traditional: No eggs get broken. My plan is voluntary, it involves privatizing a commonly held resource, and it involves recognizing property rights and creating competition to minimize the need for regulation.

Of course, the status quo -- the crazy chaotic process that I've just described that is creating all these parking pads -- also involves privatizing a societal resource. But the status quo privatizes without compensation for society. When society okays a parking pad for a homeowner, the street in front of his pad is no longer available to everyone for parking, but only to the homeowner and his visitors for access. Although people don't think of this occurrence as a form of privatization, that little bit of street has been privatized as surely as if Mike Harris had done it through legislation. All the neighbours lose; the one homeowner gains.. And his gain can be substantial. In my neighbourhood, in fact, because parking is scarce, permission alone for a pad can be worth $10,000. People often ask for permission for a pad JUST BEFORE they move, in order to fetch a higher selling price.

This method of allocation of resources is ambiguous and perverse--why should the individual homeowner gain at the community's expense? This method is also environmentally harmful -- that parking pad not only removes green space, its asphalt helps heat up the city, which increases the air conditioning load and may exacerbate global warming.

Another effect of removing street parking -- traffic speeds increase. Street parking has a well known traffic calming effect. Without street parking, the neighbourhood streets become through-fares for commuters looking for short-cuts around congested main streets.

Instead of this perverse form of privatization, , where people have ambiguous rights, I propose we unambiguously privatize the street parking, by selling the street parking space outside homes outright to homeowners. The parking spots on the street in front of your home should be yours if you want it. Others -- whether pedestrians or vehicles -- would retain an easement over the street parking spots -- they could cross it freely -- but they wouldn't be able to occupy that space without your permission, any more than they can park in your driveway without your permission.

Just think how this would revolutionize parking. Imagine that you're a homeowner, with a 25-foot lot, wide enough for 1 small and 1 large cars--and that you could buy the strip of road in front of your house for fair market value, say, $1000 a linear foot. If you had 2 cars, you might buy all 25 feet. If you had one small car, you might buy 10 feet, and someone else in the neighbourhood, perhaps someone across the street with a larger car, might buy the other 15.

Now you'd both have secure parking, and no incentive to pave over your front yard. Suddenly, that problem is solved. The City would no longer be destroying our green spaces.

The City would have been paid market value for the piece of street it just sold, so now there's money in city coffers--taxpayers aren't being ripped off. And you'd have an incentive to buy a smaller car--especially once it sinks in that every extra foot tacked onto your car cost you an extra $1000.

But the benefits to society are just beginning. Most likely, you don't need that spot 24-hours a day and, if you wish, you can make it available to others when you're not using it, the same way people with unused garages rent them out to people in their neighbourhood. You can do this informally--by working out an arrangement with a neighbour--or you can install your very own, personal parking metre, available for use by others during whatever hours you yourself specify, at whatever price you yourself wish to charge. This would also eliminate another problem created by rationing -- there's no system in place for temporary users, such as guests or tradesmen, in neighbourhoods with tight parking. My neighbours down the street who are renovating their house were surprised to learn that the City refuses to issue temporary daytime parking permits for the contractors, even though the street has plenty of daytime parking. As a result, one contractor bidding for the job added over $2000 to his quote -- how to make the City more affordable. The contractor who got the job -- a different contractor -- is routinely ticketed for illegal parking, but thanks to connections at City hall, just as routinely gets the tickets torn up -- how to promote clean government.

Petty corruption aside, privatizing street parking in the way I suggest would ensure that affordable parking was always available for visitors--in economic terms, this resource called street parking would now be allocated efficiently.

People wouldn't be circling the block waiting for spots to get open, or parking illegally too near street corners, or too near the front of other's driveways. They'd be saving themselves time because parking would always be available, and they'd be saving society pollution from their exhaust.

Now let's look at another car problem that neighbourhoods face -- unwanted traffic from those taking short-cuts through neighbourhoods.

To foil these people, planners have turned neighbourhoods into mazes of one-way and wrong-way streets. These mazes are effective at keeping out through traffic, but they also confuse residents and their visitors. I defy anyone who wants to visit me at my home before 9 am any weekday from doing so without taking an illegal turn -- there is a way to do so, but it took me years to discover it.

For a while, a colleague of mine who, lives two blocks away -- in the same neighbourhood -- often picked me up mornings on the way to regulatory hearings we were attending. It took this lawyer weeks to figure out how to do it legally, but it's so awkward to do that he prefers the illegal turn. Another colleague, who just had her neighbourhood's streets replanned, swears that there's no way for her to get home legally.

Neighbourhood mazes, of course, are not always enough. So streets get barricaded to add to the misery of street users., and speed bumps get installed to slow down traffic. The upshot of this form of planning is that grownups, at any time of day or night, can be seen driving around in circles, and stopping and starting at speed bumps. Merchants on the main streets bordering the neighbourhoods also suffer, because their customers often lose easy access to the neighbourhood store,

And why?

The main reasons neighbourhoods dislike drive-through traffic are noise and safety -- these drivers take short-cuts because they're frustrated and in a hurry, and they often exceed the neighbourhood speed limit.

Now, has anyone asked why legions of drivers travelling from A to B on a main artery would prefer to detour through residential neighbourhoods to get to their destination?

They don't do it for the scenery. They do it out of frustration with clogged arterial roads, out of frustration with a road system that creates bumper-to-bumper traffic, that is incompetent at managing rush hour traffic.

Planners have failed abjectly here -- all we've had are feeble efforts such as car-pooling, or destructive ones such as freeways or encouraging businesses to move away from congested areas. For the most part, planners use congestion to ration the use of the roads.

Yet traffic problem would vanish if we stopped pricing the use of our roads at zero. Charge people for the use of roads -- all roads -- and watch reason enter this irrational world. The British have taken the first step on this journey -- they are in the process of converting all highways to toll roads, that will be charging drivers by time of day and by distance travelled. Their next step -- which politicians openly say will not be introduced until after the next election --involves congestion charges for the city of London. But in Canada, we haven't even begun to think of taking these self-evident and necessary steps, despite the enormous benefits that would flow from them.

With time-of day pricing, fewer cars would be travelling at peak times, more at off-peak. Car pooling would pick up. Public transit's market share would increase. Detours through neighbourhoods won't be routinely taken to bypass congested traffic because congested traffic would become a thing of the past.

STREETS ARE A COMMONS. And like most commons, they are managed inefficiently. In fact, if you think about it, just about the only sectors that are managed poorly are those that are commons. That includes our forests, our fisheries, our air sheds, our waterways.

And yet, such enormous wealth for society resides there, languishes there, is trapped there, awaiting the champions who will free these riches for society's benefit. The commons, our commons, are being cheapened.

This school is entering its second quarter century, a quarter century that will take us into a new millennium. Can there be a nobler mission for this next 25 years than to unlock these riches in our commons -- to deliver them for the public weal, to stop their cheapening. Can there be a nobler mission than to turn planning from a profession that imposes solutions on people, into a profession than empowers them by setting up structures that let people work out solutions for themselves? And can there be a nobler mission than to take a stand for principle -- to say that development will come at no one's expense -- no more broken eggs to make that omelette. To say we'll create winners without losers.

Ladies and gentlemen, I salute you and this School. To the next 25 years.

Thank you.

4909 words
September 29, 1995
7:55PM