Planning Fallacy
From Norman Farrell’s In-sights blog, commenting on the NDP’s continuation with the Site “C” dam project despite the fact that Site “C” is a risky $16↑billion energy project that will cause massive ecological damage and produce electricity at 4x the cost of alternative sources..
The same is true with the now $3 billion Broadway subway (BS Line) and the now $4 billion Expo Line extension to Langley. Bot transit projects are hugely expensive for what they can do with little or no benefit for the transit customer.
- The planning fallacy stems from an overall bias towards optimism, because people are oriented towards positivity. Politicians are more likely to be biased this way than others.
In Metro Vancouver, local politicians are wonderfully ignorant of transit, transit mode and more, yet they perceive themselves to be transit experts and refuse to consider any alternative, except their own. This leads to extremely expensive, yet questionable transit developments.
- We have a tendency to discount pessimistic views or data that challenge our optimistic outlook. This is the flipside of our positivity bias: our preference for affirmative information also makes us reluctant to consider the downsides.
Again, in Metro Vancouver negative news about TransLink and transit is censored. The mainstream media is reluctant to report dissenting news, thus the public remain ignorant of real problems.
- When organizations plan projects, too often they focus on imagined successful outcomes not potential pitfalls. They are likely to overestimate their capability of achieving project goals. The result is financial disaster, something that governments will almost never admit.
Local rapid transit projects are expressed in arcane terms like car-trips or the cost of commute time. Most of it is just invented.
- Anchoring is the tendency to rely too heavily on early information when making decisions. After the initial plan for a project, managers are biased to continue thinking in terms of initial goals, methods, deadlines, budgets, etc.
This happens with our rapid transit planning, which bases the future operation of light-metro, with very dated statistics about light rail, sometimes 40 years out of date!
- Anchoring is especially problematic if original plans were unrealistically optimistic. Even if expectations were massively inaccurate, people feel tethered to original plans and make insufficient adjustments, preferring to make minor tweaks rather than major changes.
The same is true with the SkyTrain light-metro, despite the fact the system is seen as obsolete internationally, it is still perceived as high-tech and world class locally.
- Project planners tend to discount pessimistic views or data that challenges their optimistic outlook. Preference for affirmative information also makes organizations reluctant to consider the downsides.
In Metro Vancouver, negative news about SkyTrain is just not printed. Politicians completely ignore problems and pretend they do not exist.
- Executives often remain focused on ways of doing business they are most familiar with and fail to embrace new technology or anticipate changing methods proven by others to be successful. As a result, they underestimate project risks.
Local planners are so in-bedded with the obsolete light metro, they absolutely refuse to consider cheaper and just effective transit solutions, such as light-rail.
- Managers tend to ascribe positive outcomes to their talents and hard work, but attribute negative outcomes to factors beyond control. They are convinced that external factors leading to failure were unforeseeable.
Much of our transit ills have been predicted decades ago, yet today, managers claim that the problems were unforeseen.
- Workplace cultures are competitive and there may be costs for individuals who voice less enthusiastic opinions about a project. Executives favour the most overly optimistic predictions over others, giving individuals an incentive to engage in inaccurate, intuition-based planning.
BC Transit and TransLink effectively fired or had removed anyone supporting light rail, thus TransLink’s planning for LRT is so dated and biased, it is not worth the paper it was printed on.
I have spammed you and with a email address such as yours, you are obviously a troll. noemail@BCfart.com
Interesting, what the article refers to as “anchoring” is exactly what happened with the Expo Line Extension to Langley.
In September 2018, $1.63 Billion becomes $2.6-$2.9 Billion, which becomes $3.12 Billion and then finally by July 2021 changes to $3.95 Billion and they haven’t finished the project’s business case or finished a full engineering assessment, let alone have sent out the project for actual real world construction bids yet. Wow! That’s an average price increase of 7.12% every month since September 2018.
The history of this project includes at the least, two gigantic project scope change. First, a change of operating technology from LRT to Light Metro, then essentially an entirely new project because the original project’s financing plan collapsed, this forced a multi-stage project to become a single stage project.
Then a brand new project proponent/backer and manager, used to be Translink and now it is the Provincial Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, so two different planning/engineering departments, with two wholly different operating philosophies.
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The two main funding partners will both have to put in a second financial commitment and the local funding partner can’t even afford the project anymore. Two separate and distinct federal government financial commitments and were still waiting on a unknown second provincial commitment. Translink has been reduced to a token investor in this project.
The vehicle or train provider has been bought out by a competitor. The new owner Alstom, is the only company with an existing functional design for train’s propulsion system which they didn’t design or like very much for that matter, because they (Alstom) have two propulsion systems of their own that directly compete with the Skytrain’s existing LIM Propulsion system.
The whole project has now been put off by 3 years (was a 2025 completion date, now 2028) so that, many things that have already been done in earlier versions of the project, can be and must be for legal reasons, redone again. My experience tells me that another delay is coming, for reasons to numerous to mention here. Then there’s the new political, military, medical and financial realities of the world that haven’t presented themselves yet, that are always unknown and therefore we don’t plan for but will hit us anyway, whether we like it or not.
At some point people we have to come to an understanding around this project. In a time span of 3 years this project has turned from a planned, relatively speaking, cheap LRT extension project to become an overly complex and enormously expensive Light Metro extension that even by Vancouver standards will not be moving, especially when it initially opens, a huge number of passengers. All of this extension is connected to an existing and rapidly aging Expo Line, which already desperately needs Billions of dollars in upgrades, most of which, are completely unbudgeted.
Zwei Replies: The Serpentine Valley will be a big, big cost and I have been told it was because of this that TransLink reluctantly opted for LRT. It will cost a lot of money putting a heavy concrete viaduct across.