Abstract
Today, politicians and planners distrust long term visions and rational planning. Instead, they rely on incremental approaches and piecemeal solutions. Politics is both what is currently missing and what we really need. In general, one of the goals of modern society has been to get rid of politics and substitute it with automatic self-regulation devices. Urban Mobility Plans should be designed in a completely different way from the current approaches. The difference would be in the planning process and who is to be in charge. As a consequence, choices of plan content could be quite different. Planning is a category of social change. A well-functioning political system should be able to make new opportunities available and open to more possible choices. Scholars and technicians must play a role in elaborating innovative solutions. However, because the commissioners of mobility plans are reluctant to use competent professionals from fields outside traditional engineering, there is little opportunity for economists, sociologists, communicators, traffic psychologists, and so on, to develop new skills in the field. One of the major flaws in urban traffic planning is how communicators are employed. In the planning process, we are no longer asking the following essential questions: (a) why do we need to move? (b) does an increase in mobility imply a certain progress? (c) what are the interpretations of the context in which we operate? If we give answers to these questions, we could envisage more effective mobility policies, at the same time realizing that consensus is part of the effectiveness. The most practical part of the traffic policy is to understand why people need mobility, not how much they now travel, but these questions are not given priority.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittingly, Salvemini goes on saying: “Such optimism depends, perhaps, on the fact that they are sure that planning will never be planned against their own wishes, and, of course, that their own wishes are flawless. They forget that the Almighty Himself had to acknowledge, one fine day, that he had blundered in his planned creation: he repented having made man and corrected that blunder by the Flood”.
- 2.
Albert Hirschman (1982) proposed an interesting social scientist and economist perspective of how people’s behavior periodically shifts from political involvement to a more private attitude. Although, in principle, I am quite skeptical about the possibility to excerpt realistic trends in human behavior, in this case Hirschman’s model helps. True that the model is hardly predictive and it explains a posteriori what has happened in the last 50 years, as most economic and social science models do. Nonetheless, it may give a clue of what it is going to happen in the future. Because Hirschman’s predictive trend matches what I hope will happen in the coming years, I take it and strive to make it really happen, thus it is more likely to happen.
- 3.
Literature is abundant on this topic and I have reported some of it in the second chapter, mainly referring to Giddens (1991) and Baumann (1993). However, I owe most of these ideas to comparative readings of Crozier, Luhmann and (partly) Habermas about the competition between the system and the actor.
- 4.
In Chap. 7, I will describe the case of the sociologist hired by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority. The leading (engineers) planners hired him merely to confirm their own ideas and to give citizens a superficial impression of concern about public opinion.
- 5.
See the critical essay by Michel Crozier, La crise de l’intelligence (1995) in which the author – a Frenchman himself – mocks the otherwise celebrated French bureaucracy.
- 6.
I recall here an (in)famous quotation by Ronald Reagan who – at the 1988 Republican Convention – emphatically proclaimed that “facts are stupid things”.
- 7.
This does not happen because of the malevolence of politicians who deliberately want to cheat their constituencies. I’ll try to explain later in detail how it becomes true.
- 8.
In this case we should more precisely speak of “public relation” specialists, if not real “spin doctors”.
- 9.
This attitude is much more common in affluent Western countries than in growing economies.
- 10.
I am not complaining that such research was carried out by the young scholar. I do criticize, instead, that this kind of research is encouraged and awarded credit and prizes because it is at the center of academic research and concerns. As a matter of fact, it is easier to award a prize to a falsifiable quantitative research than to risk long discussion about some more debatable argument.
- 11.
At present, regrettably, social research and academicians’ salaries are also to a large extent funded by non–academic institutions and this cooperates to inhibit change.
- 12.
This sentence and my previous arguing about the role of ideology is inspired by several essays by Albert Hirschman with whom I spent a short period at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (NJ) and whose essays I eagerly read since I was an undergraduate. Here I specifically refer to Exit, Voice and Loyalty (Hirschman 1970) and Journeys Toward Progress (1963).
- 13.
Regarding more recent and more socio-political descriptions of the transformation from a mass society to other forms of social structure, I refer to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire (2004), and Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (1993) and his following publications.
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Poli, C. (2011). Traffic Planning Critique. In: Mobility and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1220-1_5
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