Kyle Wingfield

Kyle Wingfield

Sometimes it’s worth remembering how bad we are at predicting the future, and why.

It’s not because we aren’t adept at noticing trends, patterns or trajectories. Humans are pretty good at picking up on all three. Rather, it’s because we are terrible at anticipating new things.

“Events, dear boy, events,” is how Harold McMillan, a 20th-century British prime minister, reportedly summarized what was most likely to make governments stumble. Humans do things. Things that may or may not make sense. Things that don’t fit neatly into our plans.

“Well, duh!” you might say. (How terrible of me to think you’d speak so crudely!) This is Captain Obvious-type stuff. Right? Well, then why are we so often caught off-guard — particularly when it comes to planning and making big investments, especially public investments?

Some of this unexpected doing involves inventing and innovating. Planners’ time horizons may be longer than the average bear’s, but they don’t necessarily have special insight about disruptive technologies.

On the contrary: While Atlanta and some other cities were launching streetcar revivals in their downtowns during the first part of this decade, entrepreneurs were creating a new form of private, small-scale transit. They called it ride-sharing; you know it as Uber or Lyft.

If cities anticipated this development, they didn’t show it. Otherwise, they not only would have realized ride-sharing would totally eclipse slow-moving, fixed-rail streetcars as the short-distance mode of choice for just about everyone. They also wouldn’t have let their curbside infrastructure remain utterly static and unimaginative, incapable of handling point-to-point rides that didn’t involve parking the car upon arrival. Several years later, they still haven’t adapted for the most part.

We saw the story unfold again more recently, as “e-scooters” simply showed up on city sidewalks with little or no warning. Within months, the scooters were accounting for about 20,000 trips per day in Atlanta. Compare that to the 600 rides per day logged on the Atlanta Streetcar, or even the 2,600 rides per day that had been projected for it by someone wearing the very rosiest-colored glasses.

Once again, there was a hugely disruptive change in how we get around, and municipalities across the country didn’t see it coming.

These changes do more than point out an important truism about centralized planning: that the problem isn’t incompetent or malicious planners, but rather the fact no one can ever have enough information to make better decisions for all than the multitude of decisions made by the multitude of people among whom all that information is dispersed.

No, they also highlight one reason city, county and state planners — who do have a legitimate role to play in how public infrastructure dollars are spent — must tread much more cautiously in this current environment than at perhaps any time since the automobile established its primacy.

What ride-sharing and “micro-mobility” — scooters today, but perhaps not tomorrow — tell us unequivocally is that people value flexibility and customization when it comes to transportation, that they’re willing to pay for transportation as a service rather than simply as a good (the family car, for example), and that technology is allowing us to have these things in ways previously impossible.

What comes next? Self-driving cars, self-docking scooters (to help with the mess created by inconsiderate users) and airborne delivery for packages are all emerging even now. The infrastructure we need to accommodate these known innovations, much less the innovations that are but a gleam in an entrepreneur’s eye, isn’t what we have historically needed. Nor is it what a generation of transportation planners and consultants have spent their careers pitching, such as fixed-guideway transit.

“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra warned us, “especially about the future.” Some humility, and willingness to rethink what we thought we knew, would go a long way.


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