Magic and Bad Decisions

Is anyone else who watches planning in the public sector a bit disturbed by the way it's undertaken, at all levels?

So much of what gets planned is done in isolation, apparently without any kind of modelling or thinking through of consequences, to the point some of it looks like magical thinking.

It's like the last 50-odd years of behavioural economics just hasn't been acknowledged or understood and we still make poor decisions becasue of cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, group think and the psychopathology of vanity, narcissism, arrogance and hubris.

To descend, as always, in to the particular.

The recent city council complaints, on grounds of cost, that central government wants them to make transparent the analysis they have done to justify decisions, was disconcerting as it implies some current decision making is just being done by guesswork with no evaluation, before or after. 

That all looks a bit like the 'becasue we say so' school of decision making, where a groups of experts are isolated within self-contained conceptual frameworks that they see as the only possible answer. When that happens group-think takes over, meaning countervailing arguments, even really good ones, get rejected as not part of the canon. Short version: circling the wagons.

Living in Dunedin, that principle seems to have been applied to the recent works in the city centre. While replacing the elderly underground infrastructure was vital, the other City Council led works of reducing George Street - the main street and an arterial road - to one-way, adding a lot of paving and street furniture while cutting parking across the city - is reputed to have cost 28 million dollars. The last time I walked George Street there were around 20 vacant shop fronts and town feels very quiet. 

While the recession is definitely part of that decay, if you want people to stop driving and walk in the city centre you need to give them behavioural alternatives. In our case it needs to be public transport, as the exhortations to walk and cycle to our aging population, in the face of challenging terrain and climate, just aren't getting traction. The deserted urban cycleways are testament to that.

So: make public transport a viable alternative by making it go where people want to go, when they want to go. Unfortunately, the City Council don't control the public transport - that belongs to the Regional Council, and they really don't look interested as it's absolutely not their core business. Result: our bus occupancy is around 17%, including the school runs.

Improving public transport can be part facilitated by planning to make the city more dense - but being imprisoned by terrain, history, raging preservationism and elephantine planning requirements, that's not really happening in any way other than the ugliness of infill. In tandem with that, low-density housing is still mandated and sold on the city fringe. It all feels like there are a lot of fortresses with no phone lines between them.

 

Another other dangerous mindset is: 'build it and they will come.' The Dunedin covered stadium, as far as I can tell, is still haemorrhaging somewhere between two and three million dollars a year beyond debt servicing. It also cost a small city more than 240 million dollars after the inevitable cost overrun of about 30%. It's underused and that will only get worse with Christchurch soon to open it's own covered stadium. They built it...and then no-one has really shown up, ever.

How do we fix public decision making?