The pandemic has widened the divide between how Americans want to live and how urban planners think they ought to live. Even before the pandemic, surveys found that 80 percent of Americans live wanted to live in single-family homes in low-density neighborhoods, but urban planners think urban areas should be more compact and that a higher percentage of people should live in multifamily housing. In 1991, a planner named Douglas Porter urged urban planners to use the power of regional governments to get the dense cities they wanted.

Under federal law, every urban area of 50,000 people or more must have a regional government, known as a “metropolitan planning organization” (MPO). These organizations — there are currently 408 of them — are required to write long-range transportation plans for their regions and update those plans every four years. Since they distribute federal transportation and other dollars to local governments, they can deny funding to local governments that refuse to follow their plans.

There are two ways to write a transportation plan. One is to figure out how people will travel and then enable them to do so as efficiently, safely, and with the least environmental impact possible. The other way is for planners to fantasize how they wished people would travel and then build a system for that, hoping people will use it.

In 2008, I reviewed the transportation plans written by the MPOs for 75 of the nation’s largest urban areas and found that a majority were in the fantasy world. They relied on land-use restrictions aimed at forcing denser development while they deliberately allowed traffic congestion to increase, putting most transportation dollars into transit systems that typically carried only a tiny percent of regional travel, in order to discourage people from driving.

Planners believe less driving is good because automobiles use energy and emit greenhouse gases. However, data from the Department of Energy shows that people who live in dense cities such as San Francisco may drive a little less than people who live in low-density suburbs (see table 9.15), but because they drive in more congested conditions they actually use more fuel and emit more greenhouse gases per capita than the suburbanites (see table 4.34). Planners haven’t built the effects of congestion on fuel usage into their transportation models so they ignore this cost of density.

At the beginning of the pandemic, one urban planner predicted that it would make cities “more local, compact, pedestrian-friendly and connected. Cars will become the exception rather than the rule on our roads.” Of course, the exact opposite has happened. Dense urban areas such as Boston and San Francisco have lost population, while low-density areas such as Albuquerque and Oklahoma City are growing the fastest. Driving has recovered to pre-pandemic levels while transit ridership is less than half and may never reach more than 75 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Clearly, this demands a revision of regional plans that depend on compact development and heavy investments in transit to get people out of their cars, right? Not according to urban planners. To see how planners are responding to the effects of the pandemic, I reviewed regional transportation plans that have been released in the last few months and documents for plans that are currently in preparation for several major urban areas, including Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Not one of the plans I reviewed hinted that the pandemic might make it more difficult for them to achieve their dreams of turning American urban areas into compact Euro-styled cities. If the plans mentioned the pandemic at all, it was only to say that social distancing rules made it more difficult for planners to hold public involvement meetings and that reductions in tax revenues might slow the funding of their expensive rail transit projects.

This is, of course, an example of one of the basic flaws of central planning. Planners don’t really understand how cities work or know what people really want, so they substitute their own fantasies and preferences. This will only be fixed when we end transportation subsidies and require highways, transit, and other transportation providers to subsist on the fees they can earn from users.

Until then, the federal government funds MPOs with about $450 million a year, and when state and local costs are counted, they must be spending well over $1 billion a year. People concerned about where their money is going as well as where their urban areas are headed should let MPOs know how they feel about plans that are more about social engineering than safe and efficient transportation. For some ideas about how people can do so, see my recent policy brief on regional transportation planning.