How Far Should We Look In a Regional Plan?

The Tri-County Regional Planning Commission has just begun a ground-breaking planning effort that intends to develop an integrated, regional plan for transportation, land use and the environment in the Tri-County region. The project will fuse plans created by individual municipalities and counties into a coordinated guide for the region’s assets, with the intention of creating the first plan for our region to grow and develop in ways that are sustainable throughout our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. As we start the planning process, we face a fundamental decision: how far into the future should we try to look?

It is all too easy to err on either side of that question. If our vision is too short, the plan will not give any guidance on long-term trends that grow gradually over time until they become critical, and often, almost unmanageable. An example would be the degradation of the Illinois River and Peoria Lakes due to sedimentation. Sediment accumulated slowly over many years before it became visible to the thousands of people who have enjoyed the river for decades; by the time it was clear that we needed to do something, the magnitude of the problem was such that solutions were extremely expensive and inconvenient. In other words, a plan that projects only a straight-line continuation of current trends usually ends up far off the mark and unusable because it failed to take into account subtle, but powerful, factors.

On the other hand, it is equally easy to look so far into the future that the resulting plan seems to be so speculative as to be unrealistic, or even downright risky. A plan can be so revolutionary and pie-in-the-sky that people can’t ever really grasp its concepts, and therefore the plan never takes root.

Admittedly, even as a professional planner, I don’t know the best way to find the most useful middle ground between those two extremes. However, I do know that the planning effort must balance the present and the future. Many current trends will inevitably continue to influence the community, but sound planning must also identify and blend in new trends, technologies and market realities that have the potential to significantly influence the way we live, work and play.

For example, I suspect that few people understand that many aspects of our transportation system are increasingly unsustainable. Market, health and environmental pressures are leading people to seek alternative forms of transportation, such as buses, light rail, bicycles and walking, but the infrastructure to support these forms of transportation is sorely lacking. In response to higher gasoline prices, motorists are driving less and industries are moving away from highway freight and towards rail or water traffic. Combined, these trends are helping to decrease motor fuel tax receipts to the point that we are now in the position of having too little funding to maintain our existing infrastructure, let alone build any needed new facilities.

Despite these indications of changing patterns of how people and freight will move around in the future, public policy and planning has not yet fully embraced anything other than a continuation of current transportation patterns. This imbalanced system creates a self-fulfilling cycle that keeps delivering the same unsustainable results. Appropriately anticipating and planning for these subtle and interrelated changes is by no means an easy feat.