Last month’s Continental Tire Bowl in Charlotte got the big things right, a sellout crowd, great weather, competitive game, and — if you do not dwell on the Tar Heels going down to defeat -– a good time for all concerned. But a minor transportation snafu demonstrated the limits of planning for complex human behaviors.
Worries about the availability of parking on game day birthed a plan to run buses from the Central Piedmont Community College parking lots across uptown to Bank of America Stadium. On paper this was sound notion. The game was being held on a Thursday and, in theory, parking could be sparse near the stadium with office buildings full of workers.
In reality, most workers took the entire week off as part of their Christmas holiday and game-time parking was abundant, but there was no way to know this fact absent some sort of uptown worker survey. Game attendees from out-of-town also heard and read about a possible parking shortage and swamped the buses at the CPCC lot. Many ticket holders missed the opening kickoff as a result, and had to hike the distance or take cabs to boot.
The bus route planners thought the understood the preferences of thousands of people, but did not. This is no great black mark on them, simply a small-scale example of a “knowledge problem” that Friedrich Hayek often found when planners tried to solve a societal want or need with guesswork. For a much larger scale example of this problem, involving millions of people and billions of dollars, recent centrally-planned development efforts in Berlin offer another telling tale.
Writing in the December issue of Reason magazine, Dave Copeland relates that post-Berlin Wall plans for Potsdamer Platz have not gone as, well, planned. Nearly 20 new buildings with 8,000 housing units sprang up in the late 1990s, all backed by huge corporations, city officials, and planning experts. Berlin was to be the new capital of a new Europe. Except that is not what the residents of Berlin wanted. Copeland explains:
Perhaps that’s because Berliners have never seemed to want a traditional central meeting place. Berlin’s history reaches back 750 years, and even before the forced division of the Cold War, it was more a collection of 23 urban districts than a metropolis with a distinct town center. Even though Potsdamer Platz drew 20,000 cars daily in the early part of the 20th century, making it the site of Europe’s first traffic light in 1924, Berliners still had a strong degree of district pride, which was only strengthened by the city’s Cold War experience.
…“The idea was to turn this into a lively space,” says Christian Tuschhoff, a Berlin resident since 1985 and a visiting political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “But Berliners have not moved there, and all the flats are empty. They don’t find this an attractive magnet.” Planners, he concludes, “created something artificially.”
In other words, the planners had one culture or lifestyle in mind, the residents quite another, or many others. And note that no one is suggesting that Berliners are retrograde morons addicted to a destructive car culture, as might be the case were such ambitious development plans to fall flat in Charlotte or another American city. The big plan for Berlin simply did not fit how city residents wanted to work and live.
Taken together the bowl game bus woes and Berlin’s empty flats bookend the limits of government planning. Lack of information or simple disregard of what info there is when that info conflicts with the avowed goals of the planners, produces bad plans. And to compare Berlin to Charlotte – hark! World Class City fans – what info seems to be chronically disregarded by local planners?
That local residents prefer to live within a short drive of shopping and restaurants and within neighborhoods that feed into close-by schools. If they do not get these things here, then they consider going elsewhere for them, although probably not by bus and definitely not to Berlin.