In their early days, the disciplines of transportation engineering and urban planning were heavily technocratic. Both fields relied heavily on the opinions and judgments of select individuals who were deemed qualified to make such decisions and were in positions to do so. If the engineers and planners (who were usually just engineers in disguise) said a highway needed to cut through a city, it was so. They were deemed "the experts", and it was their way or the highway. Or, more accurately, their way was the highway. It was very easy to draw a thick line on top of a grid of smaller streets and receive automatic assent from elected officials (partially following from the fact that such highways received massive federal subsides and would create thousands of jobs).
Hindsight has taught us that the intra-city highway construction projects that were used as justification for urban renewal were not the best decisions for our cities. Therefore, most leading transportation and urban planning experts are now focusing on capital projects that serve the transportation needs of communities while seeking to undo the harms wrought in the 1950s through 1970s. Even at the highest level, Mary Pete's Department of Transportation is focused on knitting divided communities back together.
Generally, this has meant reducing the weight of the engineers' and planners' opinions and elevating other stakeholders' opinions—most often the communities which the proposed projects would impact. This is a messy and imperfect process, because Karen can sometimes manage to delay, increase the costs of, or block a truly beneficial project via the threat of an environmental lawsuit since free and abundant street parking is apparently required to preserve neighborhood character. But it does democratize the planning process, rather than permitting a few engineers to unilaterally make decisions on behalf of communities they usually don't live in.
This means that the transportation and planning fields have evolved to more sophisticated fields beyond technocrats saying, "this is what we need" and receiving blank checks. Sub-fields have sprung up focusing on art in transportation systems featuring local artists, station and terminal design to create a unique "sense of place", more robust and involved community outreach and engagement efforts, and tactical urbanism projects to "trial" a project and tweak it as appropriate based on the results of the trials. Much more thought is now given to not just the project itself, but also the impacts of the project.
I was struck by this line of thinking while attending the Transportation Research Board's Annual Meeting in January 2023. I attended a workshop that was focused on the design of transportation facilities in a post-pandemic world. One of the four speakers spoke on ongoing LA Metro station art projects, while another spoke on tactical urbanism. A third speaker represented the airport terminal perspective. The thesis of the airport perspective was that traditional airport planning methods and practices should be unaffected in the long-term by the changes caused by the pandemic, which were largely specific to the nature of the disease itself and were thus temporary.
It struck me that the airport industry seems to be focused on preserving its traditional methods and practices used in planning. The Airports Council International of North America (ACI-NA), a representative of whom was the aforementioned speaker, reached the previously described conclusion (that traditional airport planning practices would be unchanged in the long-term) in May 2020. COVID-19 was only months old at that point; how could ACI-NA draw such sweeping conclusions so early?
There is a general resistance in the airport development industry to changes which would destabilize these long-standing methods and practices. Many of the standard methods and practices in airport planning are rooted in transportation engineering theory. What these observations suggest is that the airport industry is still largely a technocratic-heavy field. The experts say what facilities and development are needed, and that's how it is.
Indeed, in my own experience, the community engagement aspect of airport planning is something that most airports try to weasel out of as much as possible. On-call planning contracts are generally becoming more popular than master plans as vessels for conducting most major planning, because the latter always require significant community engagement. When it is necessary to conduct community engagement, airports often carefully frame the story of what development is coming to try to obtain a quick and easy buy-in (or, more accurately, no objections) from the community. It is very rarely a fully transparent process focused on achieving a collective goal through collaboration to provide what is best for the community.
Needless to say, the airport development industry is lagging behind leading transportation trends. The field has not yet evolved to a level of sophistication where many of the secondary and tertiary elements of development are elevated to the primary focus.
