The Antiplanner has been asked to talk about “Utah’s Unified Transportation Plan: 2011-2040,” prepared by the Utah Department of Transportation, Utah Transit Authority, and metropolitan planning organizations for Logan, Orem, Salt Lake-Ogden, and St. George. While that’s an impressive title and seemingly an impressive line-up of planning organizations, this is not a plan at all. Instead, it is just a wish-list of projects that the agencies would like taxpayers to fund.

Rational planners are supposed to set goals, identify a broad range of alternative ways of meeting those goals, estimate the benefits and costs of each alternative, use that information to develop an alternative that provides the most cost-effective approach, and then monitor to make sure the plan is really working as expected. This so-called unified plan, however, has no alternatives, no estimates of benefits, no cost-effectiveness analysis, no monitoring of past plans, and no evidence that any of this sort of information was used in coming up with the list of projects that dominates the document.

On top of that, trying to write a unified plan for all state transportation facilities, regional transit systems, and metropolitan areas makes the task all the more difficult. Of course, each agency that contributed to this unified plan has written its own plan and this wish-list is merely a summation of those plans. But I strongly suspect the plans written by the agencies are just as bad.

In the past, the Utah Transit Authority, for example, overestimated projected transit ridership, overestimated actual ridership, and built costly projects whose transportation services could have been provided by buses at less than 5 percent of the capital cost. The Utah legislative auditor says that the agency’s revenue forecasts are optimistic, its cost projections are probably underestimated, and debt servicing will soon be consuming a large share of the agency’s sales tax revenues, “putting a strain on UTA’s ability to provide services.” In another audit, the state found that Salt Lake City had cooked the books in its analysis process in order to make rail transit appear more cost-effective than it really was.

The problem is that writing a truly rational plan is complicated. Making the plan look 30 years in the future complicates it infinitely more; it is hard enough to predict what is going to happen in 30 days, much more 30 years. So it is not surprising that no one tried to write a rational plan and instead just came up with wish lists.

Ultimately, this means the decisions are not being made on any rational grounds at all; they are simply political. Another way of saying this is that the agencies see their jobs not as providing sound, cost-effective transportation but as getting as much money as they can out of gullible taxpayers. One way to get more money is to propose projects that are as cost-ineffective as possible; the more cost-ineffective, the bigger the budgets, which helps explain Utah’s infatuation with light rail, commuter rail, and streetcars.

Someone looking at this plan might ask, “What is Utah’s greatest transportation need?” The right answer is not any particular project or facility but new incentives that reward agencies for providing safe, efficient transportation and penalize them for building wasteful projects. Such incentives can only be created by relying on user fees and phasing out tax support for transportation. After all, the chief beneficiaries of any transport are the users, so expecting others to pay for it will result in the wrong feedback to both users (who are undercharged) and producers (who are rewarded for producing the wrong things).

This means getting away from unified plans and thirty-year plans. Plans should be written by each agency, should focus on only the near-term because the further out they go the less reliable they are, and should expect funding only from users, not taxpayers. In the meantime, the Utah legislature shouldn’t give a single dollar of taxpayer money to agencies that haven’t proven that their plans are more cost-effective than any alternative.