Customer Reviews

The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future

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In his 48 chapters O'Toole covers a wide range of government planning efforts. Rather than a complaint only about the disastrous consequences of a specific government planning effort, he shows why such efforts are doomed by the very incentives that motivate government.

He has many years of first-hand exposure to the Congressionally mandated planning process for our national forests. He argues that the planning process has wasted over a billion dollars and severely impeded the management of those public lands. It has defocused the Forest Service so badly that they are marginally effective.

He description of the various fads that run through the ranks of urban planners are sufficient to suggest they should be called congestion enhancers. Many urban plans in the guise of "traffic calming" actually make congestion worse in the hope that people will chose a high density lifestyle. Like most urban planning this runs counter to peoples wishes. It just makes commutes more time consuming , increases gas consumption, and increases pollution.

"Smart Growth" is anything but smart and relies on substituting planners pipe dreams for the citizens personal plans and cost sensitive traffic engineering.

He includes a number of examples from Portland, Oregon where urban growth boundaries have run home costs up enough that many people settle in Washington instead. When citizens voted overwhelming against more light rail, Metro chose alternate financing and decided to build anyway. That same Metro opines "Congestion signals positive urban development."

His chapters on "The Rail Transit Hoax" and "The Benefits of the Automobile" are worth the whole cost of the book. There have been so many invalid cost comparisons that one can only assume some promoters of rail and transit are willing to lie to get even close to the cost parameters of personal transportation.

He spends 6 chapters explaining the reasons government planning fails. The result is incredibly higher costs, and often a solution more dangerous to the citizen.

His final 9 chapters suggest replacements for government planning and ways Congress could dramatically improve the management of those public functions that remain in government.

This brief outline just lightly touches on a few of the many topics that O'Toole so ably discusses.

Every legislator should read this book! The information in this book will help every citizen hold their government realistically accountable.

I was not impressed by this book. The first chapter, about forestry planning, was impressive enough, since O'Toole has spent so much of his career in that area. It was enlightening to how tax money can be wasted.

With the next chapter on urban planning, he attacks a straw man. He asserts that all urban planners claim that suburbs cause obesity. Being pretty well-read in contemporary planning, I would say that no planner actually believes that. Everyone knows that many factors go into the high obesity rates in America.

That said, he shouldn't be looking at the contemporary fads of urban planning to attack urban planning, he should be looking at the patterns planners tend to follow, and the history of planning.

Throughout the book, he uses many "if-then" statements that are fallacies. He writes, "If sprawl does not cause obesity, there is no justification for Smart Growth America's call to rebuild the suburbs" (64). He jumps to conclusions like this constantly, ignoring important counter-examples, and it weakens his argument.

This is more like libertarian propaganda than a serious and critical look at planning. It's too bad--he really seems to know a lot.

The Best Laid Plans is an insightful look at the misguided profession of planning (urban planning, transportation planning, development planning, and central planning concepts more generally), exposing and debunking the founding principals of planning that began as an outgrowth of the progressive movement and co-opted in each generation by successive planning fads that are all inevitably doomed to failure because the central conceit of urban planning is false -- the utopian notion that we can plan the future (and more to the point, human behavior) if only we are clever enough.

O' Toole does an excellent job of laying out the sordid history of planning, using real world examples of the results of various planning efforts, and makes his case for how we can achieve some of the valid goals of planning (and regulation) more successfully. He does this all from the perspective of one who has been in the trenches working with planners and government agencies to expose the failures of their best-laid plans, a true insider's view on a largely ignored but dangerously influential and powerful pseudo-scientific field that impacts us all.

Government planners claim to know all, from how individuals should be living their lives to how far to live from work and how much money to make, population distribution and more. THE BEST-LAID PLANS: HOW GOVERNMENT PLANNING HARMS YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE, YOUR POCKETBOOK, AND YOUR FUTURE refutes these claims, offering damning evidence on government planning gone awry - and what to do about it. Theory blends with case studies to create an analysis perfect for college-level classroom debate, making THE BEST-LAID PLANS a top pick for any college-level political science or American history collection.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I think this book tries to do too much, especially in the middle chapters. I'd rather read a short, focused, very-well-researched book; I thought the chapters on "Peak Oil Panic" and "Building Auto Hostile Streets" were particulary weak, which makes me question the quality of the research in the rest of the book.

The wide scope of issues tackled will give critics opportunities to nit-pick, which is too bad because I think there is a lot of great information and good ideas here.

Gets a little repetitious, but the patterns he's pointing out are there. This is a great way for folks to understand the concept of unintended consequences in heavy handed planning. Real case studies of how things work out, not just the hoped for results (which is usually all we ever hear) show what really happens and how reall harm can result from government planning. With the last 8 years of top-down attempts to manage every aspect of our lives, Best Laid Plans is a new way to look at problems and find solutions free of the political pitfalls and elitist ideologies sp often found in planning depts.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This book lays out a solid argument why centralized planning does not work. O'Toole argues that smaller units of control in everything from forestry to zoning, are usually more effective, accountable, adaptable, and accurate. Planning is simple one area where you should not cut out the middleman. He gives practical examples and presents the associated cost of bad planning. He also predicted the current housing crisis and several of its causes long before the rest of us saw it comming. You need to hear what this man has to say.

Outstanding that all elected officials should review. San Jose/Silicon Valley is now doing a General Plan review to take two years and has agreed not to consider expanding the Urban Growth Bounday established in 1974 and never expanded. This results in sky high housing prises averaging $800,000. congested roads and vacanat office buildings.
Hopefully they will read O'Toole's bookThe Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Eye opening to what local government is doing to us, I have seen this first hand.