Great Planning Disasters: With a new introduction 9780520906945

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction to the American Edition
1. Overview
Part I. Case Studies
2. London's Third Airport
3. London's Motorways
4. The Anglo-French Concorde
5. San Francisco's BART System
6. Sydney's Opera House
7. Two Near-Disasters: California's New Campuses and Britain's National Library
Part II. Analysis
8. Approaching the Problem
9. The Actors: (1) The Community
10. The Actors: (2) The Bureaucracy
11. The Actors: (3) The Politicians
12. The Actors in Concert
13. Towards Prescription
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

GREATPLANNINGDISASTERS

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Great Planning Disasters Peter Hall California Series in Urban Development, I

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1980 Published in Penguin Books 1981 © Peter Hall 1980 Introduction to the American Edition © Peter Hall 1982 ISBN 0-520-04602-1 (clothbound) 0-520-04607-2 (paperbound) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 81-43689 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). ©

This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufactured using toner in place of ink. Type and images may be less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed University of California Press editions.

CONTENTS

List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

viii

Preface

ix

Introduction to the American Edition

xi

1

Overview

PART ONE

Case Studies

i 13

2

London's Third Airport

15

3

London's Motorways

56

4

The Anglo-French Concorde

87

5

San Francisco's BART System

109

6

Sydney's Opera House

138

7

Two Near-Disasters: California's New Campuses and Britain's National Library 152,

PART Two

Analysis

185

8

Approaching the Problem

187

9

The Actors: (1) The Community

199

10 The Actors: (2) The Bureaucracy

208

Contents 11 The Actors: (3) The Politicians

224

12 The Actors in Concert

242.

13 Towards Prescription

249

Notes

277

References

287

Index

299

VI

List of Tables

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Third London Airport: Chronology London Airports: Traffic Forecasts 1963-79 London Airports: Estimated Capacity 1963-78 London Third Airport Sites: Summary Cost-Benefit Analysis London Area Airports: Comparison of Forecasts of Traffic for 1985 Maplin Review: 1990 Scenarios Airport Development Costs and Access Costs Airport Capacity and Forecast Traffic 1975 Population affected by Noise, London Airports, 1972 and 1990 London Transportation Study: Forecasts of 1981 Trips, Phases Two and Three Concorde: Estimated Costs, 1962-73 BART: Illustrative Interaction among Key Actors Sydney Opera House: Cost and Time Estimates California Higher Education (State Sector). Projected v. Actual Students: Summary University of California: Projected v. Actual Students: Summary Alternative Strategic Criteria for Games against Nature Budget Pie: Alternative Resolution Rules

2.0 22 23 31 40 42 43 46 47

70 96 125 142 158 159 259 z66

List of Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

London Airports Abercrombie's Roads Plan, 1944 The Three Options in the GLC Transportation Plan The BART System The Sydney Opera House The California Public Sector University Campuses California: Actual and Projected Student Numbers, 1974 The Two Alternative Sites for the New British Library Competitive and Bureaucratic Outputs and Prices

10 The Costs of Decision-Making

18 61 72 113 140 156 162. 173 2.17

236

Preface

Writing this proved far from easy. I have tried to make it digestible, so I hope that reading it will be easier. My problem has been this. I wanted to do two things: first, to tell some tales about a few selected 'Great Planning Disasters'; secondly, to help explain them in terms of an eclectic body of theory culled from the borderland of political science, welfare economics, social psychology and ethics. The first was simple enough, but without the second it was just higher journalism; and the second was very difficult. This could be simply because I was unable to handle the necessary level of theoretical abstraction. I am reminded of a story about Alfred Hitchcock, who back in the 19305 made a musical: 'I hate this sort of thing,' he is reputed to have said; 'melodrama is the only thing I can do.' But I think that the problem is more elusive: it is that I wanted to make the theory accessible to a group of readers, including planners, bureaucrats and officials, who otherwise would almost certainly never hear of it. And the theory proved not merely eclectic, but in many places highly esoteric. I've done my best with it. If even just a few practical people come to realize that the theory helps to illuminate what they are doing, and even call this into question, then perhaps it will all have been worth while. I have been powerfully aided over a five-year stint by a number of people. First, as always, by the anonymous librarians in many places: the British Library Reference Division (or, as it will always be for most of its devotees, the BM Reading Room), the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the University IX

Preface of California library at Berkeley, the New South Wales Public Library in Sydney, the University of Reading Library and others. Secondly, to those colleagues and friends who read all or part of the manuscript: Douglas Hart, Andrew Sharman, Andrew Wilson and Melvin Webber. I owe a particular debt to Gila Falkus at Weidenfeld and Nicolson for reading the whole text in draft and for making helpful suggestions on improving the book's readability. Thirdly, I owe deep thanks to the secretaries at the University of Reading who produced the manuscript, in particular to Patricia Hobson and Elizabeth Hodgson who typed the first draft, and to Chris Holland for a heroic feat in finishing the revised draft in almost impossible circumstances. Sheila Dance and Brian Rodgers did a characteristically professional job on the maps and diagrams. Fourthly, I would like to recognize the encouragement of Harvey Perloff as we worked side by side, in loose but warm contact, on parallel projects in the same area. As ever, his inspiration and advice have been invaluable. Lastly, as ever, my thanks go to Magda for putting up with me. PETER HALL London 1 June 1979

x

Introduction to the American Edition

This American edition of Great Planning Disasters appears over two years after the book's original London publication, and rather more than that since it was written. If two weeks are a long time in politics (as a former British Prime Minister had it), two years are certainly an epoch in the mixture of politics and planning that forms the subject matter of this book. Therefore I am glad of the opportunity to write this Introduction to the American edition. In it, I try to do three things. First, to provide a brief update of the case studies that form Part One of the book. Second, to engage in the luxury of some second thoughts on the conclusions of Part Two. And, third, somewhat in the nature of a coda, to muse on the differences between British politico-planning processes and American ones, and on the consequences of these differences for the kind of theory that needs to be constructed to explain them. The Stories till Now In some ways, the continuing sagas of the case studies—for they seem to share a reluctance to die—reflect the aphorism plus qa change, plus c'est le meme chose. Plenty has happened, but it seems always to get us back to where we were. With London's third airport, we have returned, to be exact, to where we were between 1963 and 1967. The British Airports Authority has formally proposed the development of the existing airport at Stansted to carry 15,000,000 passengers per year. It does not call it London's Third Airport, though the opponents are saying that this is exactly what it will be. The local public inquiry, as called for under British law, opened in the neighboring village of Quendon at the end of September 1981; it was generally expected to go on for a very long time. Opposed to the expansion were the local County Councils of Essex (in whose territory the airport lies) and XI

Introduction to the American Edition Hertfordshire (the county whose boundary lies only some two miles to the west) and the local district councils, as well as numerous local groups. Their evidence for the inquiry, partly published at the time of the writing of this Introduction, reveals their very pessimistic conclusions on basic matters, such as the amount of noise generated, the number of jobs to be created by the airport and related activities, the amount of consequent urban development, and the effect of the airport on agricultural land, the environment, and the landscape. Meanwhile, in the game of space chess that has characterized the saga since its earliest years, other actors have made their tactical moves. The Town and Country Planning Association—a publicminded pressure group that the planning pioneer Ebenezer Howard created to campaign for new towns—filed a planning application to develop an airport at Maplin on the North Sea coast, the site rejected in 1974 by those then in government. Under British planning law, anyone—not just a directly interested party—can do this. The TCPA was supported in the move by the Greater London Council, which had long held the view that Maplin was the right site for environmental reasons. (Later, after a change in control from Conservative to Labour, the GLC announced that it was no longer in favor of Maplin, but preferred Stansted.) Not to be outdone, the local district council at Stansted, Uttlesford District, filed an application to develop a fifth terminal at Heathrow—one of the alternatives considered in the official review of 1977—9 but rejected in favor of Stansted because of the high cost of the operation. The hapless Secretary of State for the Environment in the British government, Michael Heseltine, thus found himself in the position of having to arrange three almost simultaneous public inquiries in three different places, with three sets of expert witnesses (invariably, in practice, the same, thus forming a kind of traveling circus orbiting London), three sets of legal Counsel, and three sets of expenses. All in all, it amounted to something like a Roskill Commission Mark Two. But it was a very inefficient version—first, because of the expense of three separate inquiries and, second, because the inquiries almost inevitably could hardly get into a direct, point-bypoint comparison of the virtues and vices of the three sites. In other words, the inquiries promised to represent some kind of Planning Disaster all on their own, with no very clear outcome in sight. xn

Great Planning Disasters The London highway system has not proved as expensive as expected, chiefly because it was not built. During the period 197781, with a Conservative majority in the Greater London Council, there was again a degree of enthusiasm for roadbuilding. The GLC got some measure of agreement with government to push ahead with a roads program for London, with those roads in inner London to be built by the GLC with aid from the central government and those in outer London to be constructed directly by central government under the trunk roads program. The most important parts of this joint plan would be in and near the East London Docklands: a vast derelict area, starting close to Tower Bridge and running for about eight miles downstream on both banks of the Thames, that had been left high and dry by containerization and the shift of the Port of London downstream out of the GLC area altogether. To revive this area, a whole bundle of measures would clearly be necessary; but among them, given the chronic congestion of London's road system, would be a new highway network. Most important would be the extension of the North Circular Road— Ringway Two in the ill-fated plan of 1967—73 that is discussed in this book—south to a new crossing of the Thames close to the eastern boundary of the redevelopment zone, the extension of the MII Cambridge motorway south to link with the only completed section of Ringway One, and the linkage of this section, in turn, to a new east-west relief road through the heart of the Docklands area. By early 1981, the GLC and the government had agreed on a firm program of construction for parts of this network, but then came the May 1981 GLC election, the return of Labour under a leftwing leadership committed to massive subsidization of the public transportation system, and an attack on roads spending. Predictably, by July 198,1 the whole plan was back in the melting pot, with a decision by the GLC to abandon up to £400,000,000 worth of schemes agreed to by the previous Conservative administration. Meanwhile, successive public spending cuts—both under the Callaghan Labour government and, even more fiercely, under the Thatcher Conservative administration—had both reduced the size of the total national roads program and postponed its completion xlate. The one exception, which maintained its position as the number one national highway-building priority, was the M2-5 London orbital motorway circuiting the capital at a distance of about xin

Introduction to the American Edition 20 miles from the center. About one-quarter of its planned 117mile length was complete at the end of 1981, with another quarter under construction and substantial lengths soon due to start. Scheduled for completion in 1985, it was widely expected to have dramatic effects on the pattern of economic activity in the whole London region. Inhibited only by strict green belt regulations along its route, industry and warehousing would be drawn to its interchanges because of the unparalleled opportunities they offered for distribution to both the home and overseas markets. The fear therefore was that London, congested and cramped as it was, would become even less attractive to all kinds of activities—and that the massive outflow of industry and other kinds of activity, which had continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, would if anything accelerate. This fear was the more real since during the 1970s and early 1980s traffic congestion in London had spectacularly worsened. A combination of factors—rising car ownership (as predicted back in the London Transportation Study of the mid-1960s), the budgetdictated firing of a brigade of enforcement officers, and fines that failed to keep pace with inflation—led to violation of parking and loading regulations on an epic scale. By the early 1980s, virtually all that had been gained before from traffic management was wiped out and, according to the Metropolitan Police themselves, congestion was almost as bad as it had been twenty years before. A House of Commons Select Committee, in December 1980, described London's roads as "one of Europe's most congested bottlenecks" and a "national scandal." A few months later, the Metropolitan Police, observing that London's traffic density was fifty times the national average and getting worse, endorsed a return to the construction of the three ringways. In this, they seemed hell-bent on conflict with the Labour Greater London Council that was soon after returned to power. Meanwhile, above the non-Ringways, Concorde still made itself heard as it flew out of Heathrow and as it came back. Its transatlantic flight patterns had been designed to restrict its notorious sonic boom to the ocean crossing. But soon after operations started, residents in Devon and Cornwall and occasionally across southern England began to be disturbed by booms bounced off the upper atmosphere. To meet their complaints, both British Airways and Air xiv

Great Planning Disasters France successively altered their flight plans. Most recently, in June 1981, the Secretary of State for Trade told Britain's House of Commons that he thought the nuisance would now be largely eliminated, but the residents, who had heard that before, were not so sure. Even at subsonic speeds Concorde had proven much noisier in comparison with conventional planes than had been anticipated and was indicated in this book: 3 miles after take-off, for instance, Concorde was officially recorded to be nearly four times as loud as the long-haul 707, more than four times as loud as the 747, and eight times as loud as the Tristar. Admittedly, if Concorde was making a noise, it was doing so on a reduced scale. The London-Singapore service, which had been jointly operated with Singapore Airlines and had been losing £7,000,000 a year, was withdrawn. Only two routes, LondonNew York and London—Washington, were still being flown at a combined operating profit, the first (which made money) subsidizing the second. Air France, it was reported, was also losing money on its Concorde operations but was indifferent about this because it knew the French government would foot the bill. However, the House of Commons Industry and Trade Committee reported in April 1981 that the total deficit to the British taxpayer was £34,000,000 a year, far in excess of British Airways' overall £6,000,000 deficit on the Concorde operation in 1980. The committee recommended a total reappraisal by independent consultants of the costs of continuing the service versus abandoning it, followed by action either to cut the cost to the taxpayer or to abandon the operation as soon as consistent with a minimum cost penalty—but, in any event, no later than 1985. As had happened many times before in Concorde's history, those investigating it found the greatest difficulty in establishing the basic facts. The Department of Trade's own estimates varied strangely over a short period of time. In November 1980, the Department's representatives told the committee that it would cost £36,000,000 to cancel and £27,000,000 to continue with the plane (both estimates covered till the end of March, 1982). In January 1981, they revised these figures to £38,000,000 to cancel and £27,000,000 to continue. Then, in March 1981, they changed them again, this time to £42,300,000 to cancel and £46,700,000 to continue, now until the end of March, 1985. Clearly exasperated, the committee conxv

Introduction to the American Edition eluded that at a time of fierce financial cuts, Concorde was mysteriously immune from any kind of scrutiny. Sir Donald Kaberry, the committee's chairman, described Concorde as "a modern Frankenstein monster" that had "burst through the restraints of all financial estimates" to lead a life of its own. But, at the end of 1981, rumor has it Concorde's days might be numbered. The fact is that it is just too expensive to fly. The Commons committee of 1980 discovered that its seat-costs, per mile, were 3J/2 times those of the 747, excluding depreciation and interest. British Airways, faced with unprecedented financial crisis, might be forced to withdraw it anyway—and at that point, the government could hardly act to save it. This particular Planning Disaster, it seems, might be nearly at an end. On the other side of the world, BART has continued its predictable way. The worst of the technical problems that plagued it in its earlier years are now removed, but the system is still beset by many small operating failures and some larger ones. In January 1979, a major fire occurred in one of the trains; the seats on all the cars, it was then found, were made of a highly inflammable substance. Complete replacement was necessary, which took until nearly the end of 1980. At last, in June 1980—after six years of operation-— the Public Utilities Commission gave authority to operate at the close headways for which the system had been designed. But, ironically, the computer system could not cope. In December 1980 came one of the worst breakdowns in the system's history: both the main control computer and the back-up system failed almost simultaneously at the start of the morning peak period, closing the system down completely for three hours and leading to widespread traffic chaos as frustrated passengers took to their cars in desperation. But the major problem with BART, as before, is less technical than financial. The system has still failed to attract anywhere near the forecast traffic figures: in fiscal year 1980—1, daily weekday average patronage was 161,965, still only 63 percent of the "full service" forecast made back in 1962.. And the taxpayer was still being asked to contribute $2. for every $i paid directly in fares. The outlook for the future is even bleaker: the cars, train control systems, and computer will need renewal, at an estimated cost of $2.50,000,000, but the cutbacks in mass transit funding under the

xvi

Great Planning Disasters Reagan administration mean that the prospects for getting this money from Washington are slim. In Washington and Atlanta, although the first stages of the Metro systems are in operation (and are recording much closer to forecast ridership than BART—even above forecast in Atlanta), they too are requiring massive Federal subsidies. In Washington in 1979, federal subsidies covered 80 percent of construction costs, a $Z5,000,000 operating deficit, and two-thirds of the debt service. Small wonder that the hope for further Federal subsidy of rapid transit looks dim. In particular, the Los Angeles starter line—from the downtown area, via Wilshire Boulevard, to Hollywood and North Hollywood, estimated to cost $2,000,000,000 by 1981—seems to have virtually no prospect of running, despite having finally received (November 1980) a 54 percent "yes" vote for an additional local sales tax to help meet the cost. For President Reagan has already announced massive cuts in Federal capital grants as well as a phasing-out of operating subsidy by 1985. So perhaps the lesson of northern California has been learnt, via California's ex-Governor in the White House, in the southern California metropolis. Alone among these studies, perhaps, the story of the Sydney Opera House could be pronounced over and done. It is finished. The cost has been figured—and paid for, thanks to the lottery. The lessons for posterity are there to see. At least, the Opera House put Sydney on the world's mental map—and that, perhaps, was one of the original reasons for the political decision to start it in the first place. But with the near-disasters, the story is far from told. In California, sharply falling numbers of 18-year olds and a declining rate of high school graduation have joined with State spending restrictions effectively to freeze the two university systems. The new campuses of the 19605, in consequence, are still far from their original target size. For the future, as the University moves toward preparing a plan for the 19805, it is likely that there will be a surplus of places available and too few students. A report from the University's President, issued in May 1981, suggests that a decline in the number of students graduating from high school could cut the number of university students by some 16 percent during the 19805 and early 19905; other factors, including a higher proportion of minority stu-

xvn

Introduction to the American Edition dents (who traditionally have low graduation rates) and the general recession, could as much as double this.1 Further, unless steps are taken to share the misery between the older, established campuses (which, being popular, could always fill their available places) and the newer ones, the impact on the latter could be great. A report of 1979 used a model to project enrollments campus-by-campus: between 1982. and 1993 it showed the number of undergraduate students at Davis down from iz,7oo to 10,200; at Irvine from 7,500 to 6,200; at Riverside from 3,300 to 3,000; at San Diego from 8,500 to 7,400; at Santa Barbara from 12,700 to 10,000; and at Santa Cruz from 5,500 to 4,8oo.2 These dire predictions must be added to existing shortfalls. At the Riverside campus, for instance, enrollment actually fell through the second half of the 19705, and the Santa Cruz campus has not managed to enroll its expected number of students. By the start of the 19805 both these campuses had more resources than their student numbers justified, and the President had given warning that this could not continue. At Santa Cruz, the campus^—spectacular in its setting among the Redwood trees—seems certain never to be completed. This means in turn that communal facilities such as the library will never be expanded to their original planned size, so that the campus—fifty or more miles from major library facilities like those of Berkeley or Stanford—will remain limited as a research resource center. So the University, as it begins to develop its systemwide campus plan, is clearly faced with some hard decisions. There have already been rumors that one or two of the less successful campuses might be forced to close in a reorganization plan, to concentrate resources more effectively on the others. The near-disaster, which seemed at the time this book was completed to have just avoided the status of a true one, might now still prove to deserve the accolade. In London, the first stage of the National Library is still planned to happen, though it is stalled by the Thatcher government's public spending cuts, and the great site at Somers Town has been temporarily converted into the British equivalent of a Greyhound bus depot. Meanwhile, some users of the old Reading Room have protested that they do not want it closed. But since that would take place only on completion of Stage Two of the plan—which, on current estimates, would not happen until at least the year 2,000— xvm

Great Planning Disasters many of them may have lost interest in reading or in anything else the day it happens. The great age of austerity, Britons and some others are finding, has its own way of resolving the issue of Great Planning Disasters. Some Second (and Third) Thoughts Which brings us, appropriately, to the hard part. How, in this morass of action and reaction, do we improve the decision-making process? Is it even possible to rationalize it? Or might we do better, paradoxically, by muddling through? At the end of this book, I came close to arguing for a sophisticated muddling-through approach. It could be called (to adapt a famous phrase of the American political scientists Dahl and Lindblom) jointed incrementalism.' Or, in the phrase of Etzioni, mixed scanning.4 It would work like this. First, planners would start by forecasting—but in a way rather different from now. They would concentrate not exclusively on the quantifiables, but rather on scanning the whole environment to try to isolate the factors that could undermine the traditional kind of forecasting exercise. In particular, they would concentrate on the kinds of planning uncertainty described by Friend and Jessop5 and discussed in Chapter One of this book. That done, they would proceed as they traditionally do. They would evaluate some alternative strategies against goals and objectives—among which, I argue, social justice would be very important. But also very important would be risk avoidance. They would go for just so much of the chosen strategy as could be implemented without further commitment, and they would then wait and see. Furthermore, in choosing among strategies they would prefer (other things being equal) the strategy that was best capable of being implemented in this way. Thereby, they could best hope to avoid costly and cumulative errors. With benefit of two years' hindsight (indeed, three, since the manuscript was completed), I can see that this view was heavily colored by the experience of the case studies themselves. Those that I call "positive disasters" (the ones that were implemented but were then felt to have been wrong) were all big, discrete, single-shot projects. So, interestingly, were the "negative disasters" (the abandoned xix

Introduction to the American Edition plans)—at least in the way they had been presented to politicians and public. The right way to have built ringways in London, I suggested in the final pages, might have been not through a 347-mile, £2.oo,ooo,ooo-plus package, but through gradually upgrading the old road and building stretches of new road when practicable and necessary. Similarly, the right way to meet London's needs for airport capacity might have been to upgrade an existing airport to the limits of its capacity, including environmental capacity, then to fill up another airport, and so on. That idea, I still think, has a lot to commend it. But it was very much a reaction to the euphoric, expansionist planning style that characterized the 19608, and to the big projects that resulted. The peril in the 19805, to judge from the experience of the similarly constrained 19705, is almost the opposite: it is of doing nothing, or almost nothing, at all. The subsequent histories of the negative disasters are particularly interesting here. After the collapse of the big solution (the four-runway airport at Cublington or at Maplin; the 8oo-mile freeway package), a policy vacuum obtained. There was, it seemed, no need for an airport (existing airports could cope); there was no need for the freeways (traffic management and traffic restraint would bring into balance the demand for roadspace and the supply). In both cases, these comfortable assumptions were blown asunder within very little time. With the airport, the result was a flurry of government activity and the return to Stansted. With the ringways, a partial program was concentrated, not surprisingly, on that part of London (the eastern part) where opposition to highways had always been weak. So planning problems do not go away, though there is a perennial tendency on the part of politicians to think they will. Doing nothing, and hoping Micawber-like that something will turn up, is as bad a solution as the grand slam that goes wrong. Further, if the grand slam was the fashionable mistake of the 19605, the donothing solution is surely destined to become that of the 19805. Just because of that, I think that it is now the disease we should be fighting.

xx

Great Planning Disasters European Explanations and American Explanations The American edition of this book corresponds neatly with a long sojourn by its author in the United States. That has offered a useful opportunity to think not only about some obvious differences between the European and the American planning and political systems, but also about their rather more obscure implications for planning theory. One of the most deadening commonplaces about the American planning system, which (like many commonplaces) is also profoundly true, is that it is much more diverse, much more localized, much more multi-centered than its European counterpart. The hand of central (Federal or State) government is less evident and is felt more through grant support than through direct interference and regulation of local government activity. (Federal regulation, of course, increased massively in the 19705—but its main impact was beyond the local government sphere.) The bureaucracy at every level of government, but particularly within the Federal system, is far weaker because of the tradition of recycling the higher levels after every executive election. The politicians are much less committed to party ideologies, partly because these are weaker at a local level anyway and partly because in some states (as in California) party politics are outlawed at local level. Consequently, politics are more transactional, more committed to wheeler-dealering and trading of issues and votes, than would normally be the case in Europe. The community interests tend to be better defined and better organized, partly because of the traditional diversity of the country, which is if anything becoming greater rather than less (because of the record level of immigration during the 19705). The media, despite the TV networks, the news magazines, and newspaper syndicates, are more concerned with local issues, about which national party platforms may have little directly to say. All this adds up to a much more free-wheeling, rapidly-shifting, diversified pattern of politics than is normally seen in Britain or other European countries, though these countries may be moving down an American road. This leads me to comment on the political science theory I sought to synthesize in Part Two of this book, which was very largely drawn from a particular school that had flourished over a quarterxxi

Introduction to the American Edition century in the United States but had (I felt) been almost totally neglected in Britain. This, the so-called positive political science school, derived its theory largely from market economics, which it tried to apply to the study of political behavior. Thus politicians ("producers") were seen as competing to sell their products for votes and were interested almost exclusively in maximizing their vote return. Community groups ("consumers") were seen as spending their votes to obtain an optimal bundle of public goods and services. In this model, of course, the bureaucrats, who formed the third arm of the triangle were an anomaly, and also the villains of the piece. For they essentially wanted to maximize production in their own organizations, whether or not the public really needed it. There was thus a permanent tendency, so this school argued, for public bureaucracies to over-produce goods and services in relation to what the public, left to itself in a market, would elect to consume. All this is summarized in some detail in Chapters 8 — i z of this book. The question that arises, in the light of American experience, is whether this theory is not more applicable to American political processes than to British ones in particular or to European ones in general. My own answer is that it is, but only marginally so. American politics have historically been more transactional in character than British, particularly at the local level with which much of this book is concerned. But, as suggested above, the difference is becoming less pronounced. British local politics seem to be becoming more and more a matter of placating and pleasing pressure groups, whereas the role of the bureaucracy has been growing in the American system. Though the detailed structure of government is different in the two countries (and often bewilderingly so, because of the great variety of local arrangements that are possible in the United States), the ways that decisions get made, as a balance between countervailing powers, are essentially the same. There is of course an alternative and highly fashionable way of looking at such conflicts between powers. During the 19708, a whole school of Marxist analysts has focused attention on the operations of the state within the capitalist system and in particular on the so-called local state. All members of this school, by definition, view the state (including its local variant) as serving the deeper-level requirements of the capitalist system and thereby of the dominant XXH

Great Planning Disasters class in capitalist society. They are, however, engaged in vigorous conflict about the nature of this service, some viewing it as restricted to ministering to the direct productive ends of capitalism, others taking the broader view that the local state (in particular) serves to guarantee the "reproduction" of the system—and in particular of appropriate quantities and qualities of labor powerthrough the provision of such services as public housing and education. Elsewhere I have argued that the best way to test these two theories is by direct comparison of their power to explicate concrete cases.6 The difficulty is that the new Marxist theory, like much of the less-sophisticated Marxist theory of the past, is not inherently easy to test. It works at a level of metaphor, in which causal explanations are deduced as part of a general pre-existing schema. The connections could be right or wrong; there is no scientifically testable way of saying. Further, relatively few of the Marxist studies do get down to the level of detail at which a rigorous test would be possible—a stricture equally relevant to two of the major recent symposia embodying Marxist contributions. 7 Insofar as studies do reach this level, I am still not generally persuaded that they establish the causal connections with sufficient rigor.8 The same charge could similarly be made with regard to the use of theory in the case studies of this book: I think it likely that, until now, no one has been able to develop causal connections at the appropriate depth and degree of rigorous proof. This reinforces a point made by the editors of one of the recent symposia, namely, that this kind of new political geography is as yet in its infancy." I would like to offer one last thought, which concerns the normative suggestions in the final chapter of the book. As already said, they do point to a rather minimalist, cautious approach to public planning. Perhaps they—and indeed the previous synthesis, Chapter 12—do not clearly draw the conclusions that some readers might think obviously follows from the book: that disasters are an inevitable accompaniment to the politico-planning system, and that the task of rational public policy should be to reduce the scale of that system as much as possible. This view has become remarkably fashionable since I was working on the book; indeed, it is the selfproclaimed philosophy of both Mrs. Thatcher's government and President Reagan's. But, whether you agree with that philosophy or xxm

Introduction to the American Edition not, it is still worth discussing—at any rate with reference to the kinds of spending discussed here. To put it another way: why were most of these decisions made within the public planning system at all? Why should not airplanes, urban highways, airports, rapid transit systems, opera houses, and even university systems be developed by private enterprise or at least by public corporations enjoined to work on strict commercial principles (as, for instance, happens in France)? After all, most civil airplanes were developed in this way; why not Concorde? Highways have been built by private profit-making corporations on various occasions, most notably during the last decade in France; why not London's ringways? The London underground and the New York subway systems were undertaken by private entrepreneurs interested in making money; why not BART? Privately funded opera houses are legion, and privately funded universities include some of the world's most prestigious schools. The Marxists are of course quick with the explanation: the capitalist crisis is such that the system can only function if the state is conscripted to perform more and more of the roles that were formerly performed by the capitalists themselves. In this view, the London ringways and BART were "needed" in order to guarantee the continued viability of San Francisco and London as major international financial centers; similarly, of course, with the Third London Airport. However, since London survives without either a third airport or the ringways (at least thus far, and admittedly in a state of economic decline) and Los Angeles thrives without a BART-style system, this is not entirely convincing. Rather, it would be true to say that there are interests in cities that think their ends would be served by particular kinds of construction, and they will campaign for these just like any other coalition of interest groups (though maybe with better funding than some others). Just like any other interest groups, large or small, weak or powerful, they want the State to do things on their behalf. This is a fact of life in the modern state, and I do not think that one need invoke the "inherent logic" of capitalism to demonstrate it; nor does that logic always well explain who campaigned for what, with what success. History is a messier business than that. The Marxists, underpinned by the inexorable logic of their system, tend to be little interested in practical policy suggestions. The xxiv

Great Planning Disasters rest of us, lacking such support, may feel that our role compels us to try. Since I do not believe that the growth of the state is inherent in the development of capitalism, I am free to suggest that the state's role be diminished. However, I also happen to think that this should be done with caution. What is needed as a guide to policy, above all, is a clear statement both of those roles that only the state can readily perform, and of those that it can perform more efficiently or more effectively than other bodies. Even the Victorians believed that the provision of an army fell under the first category, whereas the provision of a police force belonged to the second. This is presumably still the case, though the modern age has developed a new (and dubious) principle: that individuals or groups can buy supplementary protection from private police forces. The growth of the modern welfare state represents a vast redistributive mechanism, which grew up as a clear improvement on the voluntary or charitable systems of a century ago; a case can be made for introducing a measure of choice and competition into this system, both to increase the autonomy of the individual and to provide a monitoring device for the efficiency or the effectiveness of the mechanisms,10 but no one would seriously propose dismantling it altogether and leaving the welfare of the poor and the handicapped once again entirely to the whim of individual charity. But most of the disasters in this book do not concern those areas of "necessary" government at all. They concern areas where, viewed coldly, it is fairly astonishing that government should ever have been (or, more subtly—and remembering the French case—that government agencies should ever have acted on any but pure commercial principles). If there were questions of social justice and distribution, they could have been faced directly, through subsidy to the needy, preferably by giving them money, a simple and effective form of welfare. That done, the decision to develop a new airplane, build roads, or start a new airport or rapid transit system should have been made on the basis of two concentric circles of evaluation. The first, or inner, circle would comprise a narrow financial evaluation. Would a private corporation accountable to shareholders, or a state corporation accountable in a similar way to state shareholders, embark on this venture on the forecast costs and returns? Would the venture yield the kind of return on investment that would attract private capital? In general, there should be a complete xxv

Introduction to the American Edition presupposition against any investment that does not meet these criteria—subject to the following complication. The second, or wider, circle would set this financial evaluation within a wider cost-benefit framework. This would consider all those items that the economist calls externalities: positive and negative effects of the investment on other people. Some of these effects might be quantifiable in terms of money, others in non-financial terms, others might not be quantifiable at all. Nevertheless, they should all be included, and an attempt should be made to judge their relative importance, difficult as that might be. Further, as far as possible the analysis should identify the groups on which costs and benefits will fall, so that an attempt can be made to judge the distributional consequences. When this is done, the results may well be different from those of the purely financial analysis. For it is common that externalities are quite large in relation to direct costs and benefits to users. These externalities should be allowed to affect the decision, but care should be taken if the results are ambiguous or marginal. Above all, because of the great uncertainty inherent in nearly every planning decision, the golden rule remains: do the minimum necessary, and leave tomorrow's decision for tomorrow. This approach, I believe, would have avoided most of the planning disasters in this book—and others unchronicled here, including doubtless others still to come. There would never have been a Concorde. There would probably have been bits of London motorway, perhaps developed (as has sensibly been done in Tokyo) as a tollway system. There would have been an incremental third airport for London, developed just as fast as needed: not more. There would have been no BART, but probably instead a refurbished version of the excellent streetcar system that was scrapped while BART was being planned, or an express bus system using reserved tracks. There would have been a different pattern of investment in California higher education, and a tentative start on a new British library at Somers Town. All of which would have been cheaper, and more effective, and less annoying or infuriating to the thousands of people affected by them, than what we have now got. Of course, the simple solution would seem less sexy to the politicians. It would build them no monuments; nor would it provide them with vainglorious election promises, the consequences of XXVI

Great Planning Disasters which would be visited on their hapless successors long after they themselves had disappeared from view. Likewise, for the technocrats it would provide fewer career satisfactions in the form of concrete poured or aluminum welded, but they might have one consolation: they would at least see something get done. For society as a whole, it might prove quite a bargain: it would allow people to live and work and move about more conveniently and more economically and with fewer unfortunate side-effects for their fellow men and women. Muddling through is no bad prescription for the ordering of public affairs, so long as it is done with intelligence and foresight. That, perhaps, is the main message of this book. NOTES i University of California, Planning Statement, Pan i, General Campus Academic Issues for the Eighties (Berkeley: The University 1981). 2. University of California, The University of California: A MultiCampus System in the i to about £i,zoo,ooo,ooo in fourteen years (all at current prices). One project (British Rail's high-speed link from London to the Channel tunnel, not discussed here) was reported as having doubled in cost, to £350,000,000 in only six months; it was then axed by the British government. We shall discover some general rules about these cases, and hence some hints on their avoidance in future. First, some degree of cost escalation is in fact usual on major civil projects: the careful analysis by Merewitz* suggests that the average is a little over 50 per cent. But secondly, the average escalation tends to be particularly high where the project involves the development and/or application of novel technologies. Concorde applied a known technique (supersonic flight) to commercial flying with its basic problem of carrying an economic payload. BART applied systemwide automatic train control and aircraft construction techniques in a context where they had never before been used. The Sydney Opera House depended on a dome structure that was not fully understood when the design won an open competition. Though there may be an element of deliberate under-costing in some projects (especially those derived from military technology) in many others there may be no way of precisely costing the bill; the risk allowance must be very great. This suggests certain rules. First, to avoid risk, adaptations of existing technology should be used, rather than totally new ones. (British Rail's High-speed Train and Advanced Passenger Trains, both relatively cheap and effective developments of very traditional technology, are good examples.) Secondly, cost-escalation rules for different classes of project should be developed, based 7

Overview on systematic analysis of actual escalation in previous cases, as was already being done by military procurement authorities, after bitter experience, in the late 19503. And thirdly, if possible, a political commitment to preliminary estimates, which may in practice be pure guesswork, should be avoided. Lastly, planners should try to incorporate some allowance for the unforeseen factor, termed by the economist Albert Hirschman 'the Principle of the Hiding Hand': that some undercosted projects succeed unexpectedly, because of circumstances that were never considered when the original decision was taken.' Hirschman quotes the Troy and Albany railroad in nineteenth-century New England: tunnelled through a mountain, it escalated in cost because of inadequate geological knowledge and resultant engineering problems, but was translated almost overnight from a commercial disaster to a success when it became part of a transcontinental system after the Civil War. Planners need to develop scenarios that will incorporate these possibilities in their final process of decision. Uncertainty in related decision areas Many problems, which at first sight appear to fall in the UE category, at second analysis can be more precisely explained in terms of UR or uv problems. The decisions on Concorde and the third London airport- the first a positive disaster, the second a negative one - were both affected by the decisions of American aircraft manufacturers to develop a new generation of wide-bodied jets with quiet by-pass engines. These planes made Concorde seem relatively less economic, and more noisy, than had appeared in i96z. They fundamentally altered airport planning, by allowing much higher volumes of traffic to be handled by fewer planes with less noise impact. The American manufacturers - Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed - were located 6,000 or more miles from London, where the Concorde and airport decisions were being made. Yet in the case of Concorde the concept of the big jet was already understood in 1961, when it was the critical element in that decision ; while in the case of the airport, there was already abundant information about the sales of the new jets. So distance does not really provide an adequate explanation even in this case. 8

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS

It does so even less when the related decision units are not distant at all, but are in fact part of the same machine. One extraordinary example, not treated among the case studies in this book, is the rebuilding of Piccadilly Circus, in the heart of London. It first became a major public issue when an outcry arose over the proposed design for a large office and shopping development on one of the three main sites on the Circus, the so-called Monico site, in 1958. The proposal was 'called in' for decision by the then Minister of Housing and Local Government, and after a public inquiry conducted by Colin Buchanan (who was later to achieve greater fame as the author of the report Traffi in Towns) the proposal was rejected. It was decided instead to prepare a comprehensive development plan for the whole Circus. A first consultant's exercise was rejected in 1963, the year of the Buchanan report, on the ground that it did not provide enough space for traffic circulation. A second, prepared specifically to deal with this objection, was produced in 1966 but was questioned in 1967, ironically on the glround that by this time government policy had changed, and that the objective now was to restrain traffic growth in London. A development brief produced an apparently acceptable solution, but this could not be implemented because yet another government department was operating a policy of restriction on office development in central London. Then finally, when an agreed compromise was reached in 1972, the property boom had collapsed and developers had lost interest. Finally, in 1979, the Monico site is being developed and it is certain that the London Pavilion site is to begin redevelopment. Uncertainty in value systems However, on closer examination the UR problems in the Piccadilly Circus case do prove to turn in large measure on shifts in values. As we shall see in the case of London's motorways, the prevailing value system of the early 19605 was in favour of greater freedom for people to drive their own cars, even in central London. By the late 19608, and subsequently, the prevailing values were in favour of restraint on traffic in central London and of better 9

Overview public transport. Similarly, the restriction on office development arose from a new perception in the early 19605 that the regional problem was being exacerbated by the growth of service employment in London. All this suggests that it is the uv area that is the most important in understanding the problem of decision-making in uncertainty. In some sense, indeed, shifts in values provide the final explanation of everything else: apparent UE or UR problems can all be traced finally to uv explanations. Thus population projections are reduced (UE) because the birth-rate falls, partly because of changes like abortion law reform (UR) ; but in turn this reflects changes in social values such as women's liberation or even pessimism about the future (uv). Economic growth falls partly because of changing expectations of businessmen (also uv). But, in a more specific sense than this, we can see from many of the case studies that uv shifts are often the direct reason for a planning disaster, especially for the negative ones, though sometimes also for the public perception of other cases as positive disasters. Consider for instance the London motorways. They failed partly because of inadequate demand forecasts (UE) and partly because of shifts in general policy that made investment in public transport more attractive relative to investment in urban roads (UR). But the main reason was without doubt a massive shift in values and the expression of these changed values in the political arena. As we shall see, when the motorway plans were unveiled in 1965-7 both political parties, together with the media and a wide spectrum of public opinion, were publicly and enthusiastically in favour. By the time they were abandoned, in 1973, there was hardly a voice left in support. The questions must be how such an extraordinary shift comes about, and how it then communicates itself from the public (or rather a section of the public, the community activists) to the politicians, often in the face of rooted policy maintenance on the part of the professionals and bureaucrats at central and local government level. We shall later find that recent academic work in Britain and the United States provides an important set of insights into this process,7 although only at a certain level of analysis. It can show, for instance, how 10

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS

activists come to exact leverage on the political process, and how the power of the policy maintainers can be bent or broken. It can draw, for instance, on Anthony Downs's concept of the Passionate Minority 8 to show how such a small group, greatly concerned about an issue in a largely apathetic world, can overcome the one-man-one-vote tyranny of the ballot box to achieve the outcome it wants. What it cannot yet do, what it has not really tried to do, is to explain the sudden quantum jumps in values which triggered off the whole process. Consider the case of Concorde. It is now condemned because of a massive shift in values against this kind of technologically speculative measure and in favour of resource conservation and environmental protection. But when the critical Concorde decision was made in i$6z, very few people publicly cared either about noise around airports or about fuel conservation; these people, like the Swede Bo Lundberg, were regarded as, if anything, slightly eccentric. Yet, in the succeeding decade, their views swept the thinking world and shifted the political spectrum. Writers like Lundberg, Schumacher and Mishan were all pleading their case in the early 19605; but until some point later in that decade few people cared to read the message. Why did the change come when it did ? How, in Donald Schon's phrase, does an idea get into 'good currency'? 9 Partly, the process may be dialectic: economic growth and technological development will hurt minorities, who will respond by fighting motorways or airports or even new aircraft. (Partly, also, there were vested interests rival aircraft manufacturers, for instance - willing to use the support thus offered.) More widely, and indirectly, a new generation grew up amidst affluence, and some of it did not like what it saw. Then, the energy crisis of the early 19705 - artificial and shortlived as it was - appeared for many people to confirm the idea, suggested by the Club of Rome,10 that this path of development led only to destruction. Such explanations are almost trite. Behind them, the suddenness of the value shift perhaps denies any tidy, rational explanation. It lies at the heart of our reason for considering certain decisions as planning disasters. ii

Overview A MODEST PROPOSAL I do not want to seem to promise more than this book can deliver. There will be no grand overarching model which will explain all previous disasters and guarantee how to avoid new ones. The object is to begin an exploration, not to end one. By applying different kinds of explanatory theory, we may gain an eclectic kind of understanding, which will then suggest some rules of thumb that future planners may use in their efforts to avoid, or at least minimize, their mistakes. If the book can go some way in that direction, then it will have achieved its modest purpose. So we shall now let the case studies tell their own tales. Here, theory will be kept to a minimum, although at the end of each chapter there will be an attempt to sum up the main lessons. But for the most part, these stories are the raw material for the latter half of the book.

12

PART ONE

CASE STUDIES

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 2,

London's Third Airport

The main point about London's third airport is that, like Thurber's unicorn, it does not exist. True, scattered across the face of England are no less than seventy-eight sites once considered in 1970 by a government commission of inquiry for the role. One, Cublington in Buckinghamshire, was the final choic of all but one of its members. Another, Maplin on the North Sea coast of Essex, was resolutely supported by that last member and was finally picked by the government of the day, in 1971. Yet another, dropped by the commission after only seven months' work, had been proposed by an expert committee and then accepted by the government, in 1967, before public outcry forced a reversal. That site, Stansted in Essex, is a recurrent theme of this chapter. For many believe and fear that in the end, despite everything, it will become London's third airport almost imperceptibly. Still in 1979 there is no third airport. After three sites have been accepted by government and later abandoned, after the expenditure of millions of pounds on inquiries and commissions, govern ment policy is to wait and see. The story of the third London airport is an extraordinary history of policy reversals, last-minute abandonments, contradictions and inconsistencies in forecasts. It has all the ingredients of a great planning disaster. To understand the story, a first essential is to follow it as contemporaries saw it, but then to use the benefit of hindsight. It is a long and tortuous history, difficult to follow in detail - after the biggest inquiry, by the Roskill Commission in 1968-71, someone unkindly said that the documentation, suitably pulped and 15

London's Third Airport compressed, could provide all the material needed for the runways. But there is one essential clue to understanding: throughout the controversy there has been an intimate and sometimes confusing relationship between two aspects, the timing of the need and the size and location of the airport. As estimates of timing have changed, sometimes radically and suddenly, so has the perception of the right solution — a theme to which we shall return. THE B E G I N N I N G S

The story really begins in 1943, in the middle of World War Two. For at that point the government decided to build a new heavy military transport airfield at a site called Heath Row, fifteen miles west of London on the edge of the built-up area, where, as long ago as 1931, the Fairey Aviation company had laid out a small grass field. From the start, this new site was designed for conversion to peacetime use. For it was evident that London's major airport between the two world wars, at Croydon, was too small and too constrained by suburban development on all sides to serve the needs of expanding air traffic. In fact work took longer than expected - thus setting an unfortunate precedent for the whole subsequent history of London airport planning - and London Heathrow had its first flight on i January 1946, opening officially as London Airport on 2.5 February. Heathrow had some obvious advantages. It was close to central London. It had one of the few really good road connections towards the centre (the six-lane Great West Road, or Brentford-Hounslow bypass, opened in the 19208) and already preliminary work had begun on an extension inwards to central London, a project not fully completed until the 19705. The land was almost perfectly flat and meteorological conditions were reasonably good. But the airport took several square miles of what was left of some of the best agricultural soil in all Britain: the market gardening lands on the Taplow terrace gravels, whose loss to suburban development the geographer Dudley Stamp had bemoaned in the 1930S.2 And, perhaps even more important, 16

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS because of the prevailing westerly winds it was clear that the main approach paths would be directly over west London. Yet the Minister Lord Winster said, when it opened, that a main consideration in its choice was that it would cause the minimum of disturbance to householders.3 It was clear that no one at the time, including Patrick Abercrombie when he prepared his Greater London Plan in 1944, had any appreciation of the potential noise problem in the jet age, even though Abercrombie himself must have heard the first jet aircraft overhead as he finalized his report.4 Traffic at Heathrow built up rapidly as expected, and even by the late 19408 the government had to contemplate a second airport to relieve it at peak periods. There were two leading candidates. One, Gatwick, had opened as long ago as 1930; twentyseven miles south of central London on the main Brighton road and railway, it had been used as a bad-weather relief for Croydon in the 19303. It was taken over in 1945 by the government, who first announced that it would not develop it, then that it would, then again that it would not - this last in 1949. The other candidate, Stansted in Essex, some thirty-four miles north-east of central London, had been built during World War Two as an American air base and was a military airfield until 1949, when the Air Ministry sold it to the Ministry of Civil Aviation with the firm understanding that it would be London's second airport.5 Ironically, at this point the Cold War intervened. American air strength built up rapidly in East Anglia, since this was the optimal location within Britain for penetrating deep into the Continent. In consequence Stansted lost its potential role, for it would have presented difficult air traffic control problems. So the government, in a White Paper of July 1953, proposed that Gatwick should become the second airport - mainly, it appears, at the peak season — with Blackbushe in Hampshire acting as a reserve. A quick public inquiry followed; it had very limited terms of reference, and the inspector refused to accept evidence on the possibility of other sites, so, despite some local protest, expansion at Gatwick was approved in a government statement of October

17

London's Third Airport

Figure I: London Airports.

18

GREAT PLANNING DISASTERS

1954.* Blackbushe closed in 1960, and therefore the overspill from Heathrow became concentrated on Gatwick. Like Heathrow, Gatwick was far from optimally sited. True, it was on the flat lands of the Sussex Weald, and it had a good direct train service to Victoria. But it was too close to built-up areas, and as early as 1947 the government had determined to build a new town at nearby Crawley. Additionally, the land to the north and west, especially around Leith Hill, was, and is, a traditional pleasure-ground for Londoners. It is ironic to think that, had either site been evaluated by the rigorous criteria of the 19605 or 19708 there is little chance that it would have passed the test. Gatwick in the 19505, as at the end of the 19705, was a onerunway airport. But the possibility always existed of giving it a second runway, thus making it eventually as important as Heathrow. The government in 1953 had given certain pledges that Gatwick would not be developed to its fullest extent, but a House of Commons subcommittee in 1960 found officials evasive on this question. This was significant, because by then the question of a third airport was emerging. The committee members were worried that in due course Stansted might develop on the Gatwick pattern, but despite pressure the Ministry of Aviation officials refused to be drawn: they said that they continually looked ahead as far as they could, but that they could not see indefinitely ahead and they must avoid costly error. The committee, fearing that Stansted might become the third airport by stealth, condemned Ministry of Aviation experts for indecision and inactivity. David McKie, commenting on this episode, concludes that even then officials had determined on a strategy: a quick decision would be taken in 1965, at a time when the need for the third airport was so manifest that Stansted would be the only choice.7 In view of the history of the late 19705, this is particularly significant. The subcommittee recommended that an early decision should be taken in principle on whether Stansted should become London's third airport.8 In response, the government in November 1961 set up an inter-departmental - that is, purely official 19

London's Third Airport Table i THIRD LONDON A I R P O R T : CHRONOLOGY

January 1946 July 1953 June 1963 December 1965

February 196

May 1966 May 1967 February 1968 May 1968

December 1970 January 1971

Heathrow opens for traffic. White Paper (Cmd. 89oz) confirms Heathrow as first airport, Gatwick as second with Blackbushe supplementing it; Stansted in reserve. Inter-departmental committee report proposes Stansted as third airport. F Publlc mcluiry on Stansted proposal. Inspector's report on inquiry (not then published) finds Stansted case non-proven, recommends look at alternatives. White Paper (Cmnd. 3159) announces government intention to proceed with Stansted; Inspector's report made public for the first time. Government announces independent commission into third airport timing and location. Roskill Commission inquiry.

Roskill Commission report recommends third airport at Cublington, Buckinghamshire. April 1971 Government announces that airport will be built at Maplin, Essex. August 1973 Maplin Development Act establishes Development Authority. July 1974 Labour government announces abandonment of Maplin project; publishes Maplin: Review of Airport Project, Novbember 1975/ Government consultation document Airport Strategy for Great Britain suggests alternativ lunc IQVO scenarios precluding Maplin. February 1978 White Paper Airports Policy (Cmnd. 7084) reaffirms Maplin. August 1978 Setting-up of Advisory Committee on Airports Policy.

zo

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS

committee to consider requirements for a third London airport, including timing and location, the two key phrases that were afterwards to recur. Significantly, of its fifteen members, eight were officials from the Ministry of Aviation, five others represented air traffic in one way or another, one represented ground transport, and there was a sole representative from the planning division of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. (At this time planning was at a low ebb both within government generally and within the Ministry.) It was perhaps small wonder that when the committee reported to the Minister of Aviation, Julian Amery, in June 1963 they found that Heathrow and Gatwick, even with two runways at the latter, would be unable to handle all London's air traffic from about 1973; that a third airport to relieve them should be built on the Heathrow model with two parallel and independent runways; and that, of a dozen sites examined, Stansted seemed to be the only suitable one.9 The committee's forecasts are difficult to compare with those made in subsequent inquiries, because they are mainly in terms of SBR (Standard Busy Rate - the hourly rate of traffic movement, passengers or aircraft, reached or exceeded on thirty occasions during the summer). On this basis they calculated that Heathrow would run out of capacity by 1971; Heathrow and Gatwick considered together would have an overspill problem by 1973. The committee also gave forecasts down to 1970 in terms of the conventional measures (air traffic movements and passengers) used by later forecasters. They are shown in Table 2 but they cannot reliably be projected beyond 1970 because they do not have a simple linear relationship to the SBR forecasts. For the same reason it is difficult to reconstruct the Committee's estimate of airport capacity in conventional terms (Table 3), except that Heathrow was predicted to overspill after 1970, when it was forecast to have 15,000,000 passengers (2-19,000 air traffic movements) a year. (Heathrow in 1976 actually carried 23,200,000 passengers.) Gatwick was estimated to overspill in 1980, even with two runways; a 'guesstimate' is that it might carry about 3,200,000 passengers then. (In 1976, with one runway, it carried 5,700,000.) The two airports together would have an overspill 21

London's Third Airport Table z LONDON AIRPORTS : TRAFFIC FORECASTS 1963-79 (i) Air Traffic Movements

(ooof)

Inter-dept. Committee 1963 Lower' Middle Upper.

White Paper 1967 Roskill Commission 1971 Maplin review 1973 (No Tunnel)

1965

1970

no

2-79

in

"•5

Low Assessment High

1975 5

'*77 183 302

3*7 353 402

347J

39*

1980

1985

p

5

317 43° 515 470

p

5

p

p

545

115

347

450 565

p 580

p

White Paper 1978 (2) Passengers (Mill.) Inter-dept. Committee 1963

11.4 Lower Middle Upper

White Paper 1967 Roskill Commission 1971 Maplin review 1974 (No Tunnel) Consultation documents 1975 White Paper 1978

Low' Assessment High. Low~ HighLow High

17-4

II-9I

18.4 19-3 21.7

"••71

22.0

I1-7J

21.0

11.7!

2.2..O

11.7

12.O

Sources: Documents listed "Interpolated

22

3 340

Low High

Consultation documents 1975

1990

3

>

25.6 29.6 37-8 36.1

Z8.81

>

33.0 43.6 63.7 56.6'

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

8z-7 58.1 61.0 75.8

78.3 85.0 114.5

33-9 46.2

47-7' 71.8'

67.0 106.6

36.7 41.9

51.1 63-5

65.9 89.4

Table 3 LONDON AIRPORTS: ESTIMATED CAPACITY 1963-78 Heathrow

Air traffic movements ooo

Passengers Saturation mill. Date

Inter-dept. Committee 1963 229 + 15+ Lower 16.3 1970 354 30 1978 ?0 White paper 1967 Middle 15.7 Upper 15.2 Roskill Commission 1971 Maplin review 1975

314 338

38-53

Consultation documents 1975/6

308

38-53

White Paper 178

Sources: Documents listed.

275

Gattvick

38

* Heathrow + Gatwick only

1971

Air traffic movements ooo ?6y

London Airport system without third airport

Passengers Saturation mill. Date

?3

1980

1970

1969 1968

19831990

?6.6

no 168

16-15

168

16-25

160

25

i97*-4

Air movements traffic ooo ?JIS*

?*o*

1973*

354

30

1978

3° 3O

*975 1973

47»

°

61 61-104

1981 After 1990

59°

50-104

555

7*

19889° 199° or after

353 359

6i

I 8

9 390

Passengers Saturation mill. Date

London's Third Airport by 1973, at which point - again on a very rough estimate from SBR - they would have rather less than zo,ooo,ooo passengers; in actuality, they had 28,900,000 passengers by 1976. So the main conclusion - an urgent need for the third airport in 1973 - was based on a hopeless underestimate of both Heathrow's and Gatwick's capacity. The main reason was a failure to appreciate the increased size and capacity of planes (a point stressed by the consultants Halcrow and Partners in their evidence for the County Councils at the Stansted inquiry). The committee went on to forecast that by 1980 the overspill problem would demand two runways at the new airport. But, because of air traffic control problems, any airport within reasonable distance of London (50 miles) could not operate planes in all directions. Even with this constraint, air traffic control would make it impossible to site the third airport south of London, or northwest of London (the area the Roskill Commission chose, after a more detailed investigation of the problem, in 1-971). This, plus ground access constraints - the requirement that the site be within one hour of central London by rail or road - narrowed the choice to about a dozen sites east and west of London. To the west, there was no site with the desired capacity within an hour's ride. To the east, Stansted, though not perfect, in the committee's words, seemed the only possible site. It satisfied air traffic control constraints. It was an operational airport with a 10,000foot runway. Parallel runways could be laid, and so it was suggested that the noise problem should not be severe. It was reasonably close to London, and with completion of the planned MII would have good access. True, it could not operate omnidirectionally, it would interfere somewhat with East Anglian military flying and it would take a lot of good agricultural land, but these disadvantages were outweighed by its merits. Therefore, the committee predictably concluded, Stansted should be developed by the early 19703 to become, eventually, a two-runway airport with a similar level and type of traffic to Heathrow's. Equally predictably, the recommendation met with a storm of local protest. When the public inquiry into Stansted development opened in Chelmsford in December 1965 - itself a concession by 2-4

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS

the government in the face of political pressure, for as a development within existing airport limits it did not demand a statutory inquiry at all - the North West Essex and Herts Preservation Association had raised more than £23,500 from 13,000 people to produce an excellently reasoned technically competent counter case. It was skilfully based not on opposition to the Stansted development perse, but on the need for a prior independent inquiry into a national airport policy, which was demonstrably lacking. The Essex County Council was at first resigned to the Stansted proposal, but later it agreed to appoint independent consultants, who reported that before a firm conclusion could be reached a more detailed study would be needed. The evidence produced by the consultants at the inquiry called for a comprehensive costbenefit analysis such as was used with major World Bank proposals, for instance. The local protestors naturally concentrated on the environmental impact. The inquiry proved uncomfortable for the government. Under examination, officials were found to be shaky on critical points such as whether Stansted really fell within the critical one-hour travel time to central London. The inquiry ended in February 1966 and the inspector, Mr G.D. Blake, reported to the President of the Board of Trade by the end of May. But the report was not published for a whole year, and only then did the reason for delay become apparent. For the inspector concluded that the Stansted proposal succeeded only on the ground of air traffic control. On a series of other criteria, there were strong arguments against it. On planning, the evidence was that Stansted was not the right place for a traffic focus of this kind and the urban development that would go with it. On access, the proposals would be unacceptable to passengers and airlines. On noise, restrictions would have to be imposed that would materially restrict full operation. On amenity, noise and traffic nuisance would greatly change the character of the neighbourhood and cause great local resentment. Lastly, the scheme would take many thousands of acres of good agricultural land. He concluded: 'It would be a calamity for the neighbourhood if a major airport were placed at Stansted. Such a decision could only be justified by national 25

London's Third Airport necessity. Necessity was not proved by evidence at this inquiry.'10 He therefore recommended that: 'a review of the whole problem should be undertaken by a committee equally interested in traffic in the air, traffic on the ground, regional planning and national planning'." This suggested either an independent commission or yet another government review. But the government was against an independent inquiry, both on the ground of urgency and because it thought that all the facts had been fully explored. Accordingly it set in train its own review, covering aviation, surface transport, planning, economics and agriculture. The findings were published in a government White Paper in May 1967, when the inspector's report was also released to the public. With total predictability, the White Paper confirmed that the government was sticking to the Stansted decision. One main reason, as before, was the belief that a third airport was urgently necessary. Once again, the government had gone through the forecasting exercise, this time using upper and lower limits as well as a 'most likely' forecast, and incorporating new factors like the advent of the 'jumbo' jets then on the drawing-boards. This (Tables 2 and 3) again showed that Heathrow would have an overspill problem by 1970 and Gatwick between 1974 and 1976, depending on whether or not it got a second runway. In practice it might not be possible to stretch capacity to the limit, so there was a need to have a new airport by the middle of the 19705, and possibly earlier than that. The White Paper gave short shrift to the notion, canvassed by the inspector, that this date might be pushed back by vigorous development of provincial airports : too much of the total demand was concentrated in the south east, it concluded, for this policy to have much impact. So an airport was needed. The question was whether there was a better alternative than Stansted. The review looked at a series of possible sites in the sector north, east and west of London, including locations as far afield as Ferrybridge in Yorkshire and Castle Donington in Leicestershire, but also Foulness, near Southend, on the Essex coast. This was important because Foulness was already emerging at the Chelmsford inquiry as the 26

GREAT P L A N N I N G DISASTERS

favoured alternative site. Nevertheless the review concluded against all the alternatives, including Foulness, on the grounds of the difficulty of removing the army firing range at Shoeburyness, the closure of Southend Airport, and not least the.cost, then estimated at £15,000,000 or more. It also rejected Thurleigh near Bedford, chiefly on the ground of conflict with military operations. Both Foulness and Thurleigh were to reappear on the Roskill Commission's short list of sites. So, the White Paper concluded, Stansted remained the first choice. As the inspector had recognized, it was satisfactory in terms of air traffic control; the flat terrain meant low construction costs; road and rail access were satisfactory (though seventy minutes was now the quoted time); noise was not as serious as the inspector had suggested. Agricultural land would be a serious loss, but so it would be at alternative sites. Regional planning was the strongest objection since the airport would invade one of the biggest wedges of green land close to London; but on balance this was outweighed by Stansted's advantages. Therefore the British Airports Authority, which by then had acquired Stansted (as well as Heathrow and Gatwick) from the Ministry, should go ahead with a plan for major development, which would require planning permission in the normal way. The White Paper released a new storm. It was the subject of an impassioned Commons debate on z