Paul Sorensen Moving Los Angeles, Short Term Policy Options for Improving Transportationť (2008)

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.2Implications for Transportation Decisionmaking in Los AngelesTaking stock of the dizzying array of agencies and stakeholder groupsactive in Los Angeles, the important observation is that each has atleast some influence over transportation decisionmaking in the region.While the structural relationship among agencies may appear hier-archical, the authority over decisions is often shared among variousagencies and stakeholder groups.Transportation planning does notobserve a simple model amenable to top-down policy actions.In fact,action is often driven from below by actors who have no formal deci-sionmaking authority but are nonetheless empowered by environ-mental and civil-rights laws and other tools afforded by a deliberativedemocracy, and citizen-action groups continue to demonstrate theirinfluence in federal, state, and local legislation as well as in court.Suc-cessful transportation policy and planning in Los Angeles will thusrequire successful consensus-building, as cooperation among multipleactors is invariably required and individual stakeholders have a varietyof mechanisms through which they can try to defeat any plan or proj-ect they dislike.Theoretical Insights on Consensus-BuildingThe tangled mass of interests, values, fragmented authority, andempowered stakeholders is not unique to Los Angeles, nor is the needfor building consensus among public-sector agencies and stakeholdergroups unique to transportation planning.Indeed, these issues havebeen of central interest to political scientists and planning theorists2NRDC, for example, has frequently and successfully challenged numerous agency deci-sions for violation of the CAA, the CWA, and other environmental laws (NRDC, undated).In a recent case, NRDC and BRU filed a lawsuit against Metro in June 2007 for violatingCEQA by approving bus-fare increases without considering the environmental impactssuch as increased air pollution, global warming, and traffic congestion of this decision.Consensus-Building Recommendations 153for decades.We thus found it helpful to examine the body of researchin political and planning theory, and this review yielded several keyinsights that may help to foster more effective transportation decision-making in Los Angeles.In this section, we briefly highlight the principal findings fromour review of the relevant literature (Appendix D provides a detaileddiscussion of our review).The first observation is that congestion rep-resents a classic tragedy of the commons problem (Hardin, 1968),under which unrestricted access to a shared but finite resource (theroad network, in this case) inevitably leads to overuse of that resource(severe congestion).Hardin demonstrated that such problems can besolved only by enclosing the commons (rationing access to the resource)through a set of rules involving mutual coercion, mutually agreedupon (Hardin, 1968, p.1247).Developing the necessary mutual agreement requires efforts tofoster collective action, and this is difficult in an open and increasinglydeliberative democratic society characterized by a broad range of often-competing interests and values.The need for collective action helpsexplain the decline of the rational-comprehensive model of planning,an approach often applied to transportation decisions in earlier decades.Rational-comprehensive planning assumes that a set of experts can,through a process of logical and objective analysis, arrive at an optimalsolution that best serves society as a whole (Lindblom, 1959).Failure toaccommodate the diverse views of multiple stakeholders in the process,however, typically undermines the conditions required for collectiveaction.Thus, plans developed through the rational-comprehensive pro-cess, regardless of their elegance, often fail at the point of implementa-tion because they have not achieved sufficient buy-in from the publicas a whole (Black, 1990).More recent research on policy implementation grounded insystems theory, principles of organization behavior, individual strat-egizing theory, and communicative action leads us to the advocacycoalition framework (ACF) (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1988; Sabat-ier and Weible, 2007) and planning through consensus building(Innes, 1996).These two theories explicitly address the need for collec-tive action and thus suggest means for successful consensus-building.154 Moving Los Angeles: Short-Term Policy Options for Improving TransportationBased on our review of these frameworks, as well as the lessons offeredin other studies in the literature of transportation decisionmaking, itbecomes possible to enumerate the following guidelines for fosteringsuccessful collective action:Build strong and persistent leadership.Maintain effective communication among agencies and stake-holders.Develop sufficient agreement on the problem.Provide credible underlying research and analysis.Ensure equitable allocation of costs and benefits.Cultivate motivated supporters.Ensure consistent enforcement of agreed-on rules [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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