LOCAL SOCIAL OBJECTIVES AFFECTING IMPLEMENTATION

"It is on the law, on the response of the public to proposals for large schemes of expenditure to be undertaken on their behalf, and on the attitude of legislators and administrators to current economic problems as much as (or more than) on technical improvements in the arts of carriage and on the structure of the industry, that the future efficiency of British transport will depend".

— G. Walker and C.J. Savage: 1958'

The heart of my research is to study the nature and significance of factors that led to the low implementation of urban transport plans. Therefore, initially my search for recent works was limited to the theory and practice of transport planning. The study of policy execution in transport planning

has not attracted much attention by serious professional researchers. In

commenting on the low implementation of urban transport plans one must first

analyse the factors which might cause it. Frequently such analyses as have

been made ascribe the failures to a single dominant cause - e.g: pressure

group activities, and then proceed to prescribe remedies to overcome that one p

problem . I therefore extended my search to include political and social sciences with general emphasis on urban planning.

Most researches completed in this area identify one or more factors affecting the implementation of transport plans which may be loosely grouped into five categories.

(i) Variation in local social objectives, e.g.: as reflected by politicians and pressure groups;

(ii) Economic factors, national and local;

(iii) Conflicting value systems as manifest in national political and pressure groups;

(iv) Technology, the state-of-the-art in both transport and forecasting (v) fbtional institutional factors.

3.1 LOCAL SOCIAL OBJECTIVES AFFECTING IMPLEMENTATION

The POLITICS OF URBAN TRANSPORT PLANNING by John Grant is the case study most relevant to my research in this aspect.^ Grant examines the transportation policy formulation in three U.K. country boroughs - Portsmonth, Southampton and Nottingham between 1947 and 1974. His exam­ ination begins with the hypothesis that,

3.2

" ... there are three major actors who became involved in the transport policy process at the local level. These are the members of the Council; the salaried officers; and groups from Oie

communi ty...

Interaction between the actors takes place within legal, financial and technical constraints which limit the range of options

available ... Since local policies have varied widely it

would seem clear that local policy making systems are indeed able to exhibit a degree of initiative and independence from Whitehall". He then provides evidence based on transport policy formulation from the three towns to conclude that,

"There is generally a close relationship between the (three) factors to influence the transportation planning and policy making process and the transport policies which developed in each city".

Grant unndertook his research under the supervision of Professor Peter Hall who extended the above theory in his recent book, 'Great

4

Planning Disasters'. Hall attempts to explain why great planning disasters such as Concorde or the London Motorway network occured. He based his explanation on the works of Friend and Joseph who dis­ tinguished three kinds of uncertainty in planning denoted as types UE, UV and UR. IE is an uncertainty about the relevant planning environment, i.e. everything outside the immediate decision-making system, such as forecasts of population and economic growth. UR is an uncertainty in related decision areas. It deals with the be­ haviour of other individual decision makers or these same decision makers. They may be in other organisations, or in other parts of the same organisation. E.g.: a landuse plan being rejected because the surrounding areas are unable to handle the traffic generated. UV is an uncertainty about value judgements, which in­ cludes all the problems where information has been assembled, but where the final decisions turns upon questions of value. In any democratic society, however manipulated, it must include the problem of gauging the values of the client population and predict­

ing how these may change over time. E.g.: the London motorways, where the prevailing value system of the population in the early

1960s was in greater freedom to drive their own cars, even in Central London.

3 . 3

By the late 1960s and subsequently, the prevailing values were in favour of restraint of traffic in Central London, and of better public transport. Hall concludes that,

"In some sense, indeed, shifts in values provides the final explanation of everything else: apparent UE or UR problems can all be traced

finally to UV explanations ... consider for instance the London Motorways. They failed partly because of inadequate demand forecasts

(UE) and partly because of shifts in general policy which 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."

He substantiates this theory based on six case studies which complements Grant's work.

Somewhat in contrast to the above findings, Griffiths (1966) stated that, "The surveyor knows more about his job and its problems (whether he sees his problems narrowly or widely) than any one else in the locality. And it is hiB function to present to his committee the highway schemes which he believes to be of the highest priority ... Party caucuses seem to exercise little influence over the decisions affecting the selection of schemes and their priority. This is not only because highway construction, improvement or maintenance lack the element which involve party political passions - an element present for example in many educational questions - but also because of their technicalities.

5 It is difficult to have a party line about an improvement line". However, Griffiths refers to the 1960s and concentrated his efforts on the functioning of county councils as opposed to city councils. Also a number of other research workers dealing with urban political process have provided evidence supporting the importance of party politics

in decision-making. In the U.K., party politics are less obvious in county than in city councils.

Decision-making in British local government has been a subject Of intense research interest in the U.K. since the study undertaken on behalf of the Royal Commission on Local Government.^

3 . 4

The case-study approach is frequently employed for this purpose where the decision-making in a selected town is studied. Ihe conclusions by Newton, Dearlove and Wiseman are typical of those arrived by the range of the U.K. publications in this field.^'0,0

Newton studied the democratic processes and decision-making in Birmingham. His conclusion was that the party hierarchy and the bureaucracy were

equally responsible for decisions.10 Dearlove studied the case of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea where the Conservative party had a

strong majority. In this case, the author concluded that the party political leadership was substantially responsible for decision-making in consultation with their officials who saw their role as that of implementing the decisions. Wiseman reporting on his experience in Leeds during 1951 to 1960 stated that,

"The Council Group, consisting of all the majority party aldermen and councillors is the supreme controlling body ... Official advice is channelled through the leader, the Deputy and the chairman of the various committees of the Council ... whatever the advice, responsibility for acting upon it rests with the majority party" . ^ 1

Boaden is one of a very few researchers who used statistical analysis to study urban policy-making in England and Wales. One of his conclusion was that:

"Councillor disposition measured in party terms was the most relevant 12

variable (to affect service provisions 1"

Generally, case studies completed before the 70s did not consider local pressure group activities as an important factor in decision-making. For example

Newton reported that,

"The main feature of these results is that although council members belong to many organisations, and often give assistance to them they are less likely to make use of them as sources of collective opinion about public

13

matters".

However, these comments may be the result of analysing a large number of routine decision-making that takes place in a council.

3 . 5

Pressure by more powerful groups may be reserved for special occasions such as when the council deliberates on the provision of major urban roads. Secondly, as shown by Mick Hammer and others, before the 1970s, pressure group activities in transportation was dominated by the highway lobbies, the most prominent of them being the British

14

Road Federation. A large number of anti-road lobbies were established in the 1970s, e.g.: Transport 2000. These lobbies have put forward a number of alternative solutions to tackle local transport problems.

Those by Transport 2000 and London Amenity and Transport Association are of particular interest in this respect. 1 J ’

I have devoted chapters 11, 12 and 13 to analyse the influence of local social objectives (as reflected in party polities, by professional groups and by pressure groups) on plan implementation.

Research methods to study urban policy-making, employed in the U.K. have their origins in the U.S.A. The "reputational approach" suggested

1 Y 18

by Hunter in 1953 is the method favoured by sociologists. ’

It is based on asking a selected number of interviewers to name and rank the influential people in the city. The people named most frequently were classified as forming the city's power structure. The political-scientist has frequently used the 'decisional approach" , first suggested in the U.S.A. by Edward Banfield and Robert Dahl in

1961. Instead of studying the reputation for power, the work

attempted to get a picture of real power by analysing actual decision. By using interviews, newspaper reports, official documents and

participant observation, the aim is to reconstruct political decisions in order to see who initiated them, who opposed them and who won and lost the political battle. However, because of the significantly different systems of local government operating in the U.S.A., the results of these studies may well be somewhat misleading for 1 application to the situation in the U.K.