Practitioners and theorists have long searched for a clear definition of the role of planning. The attention to the subject is not surprising since a clear role lends any profession’s sense of identity, integrity, and legitimacy. Wildavsky (1973) criticized the planning profession’s lack of clarity in this regard, implying that the profession was attempting to encompass too much. He suggested that if “planning is everything, maybe it is nothing.” This view exemplifies a debate common to many disciplines over what constitutes core theory and practice.

However, such debates are particularly important for inter-disciplinary professions such as planning. This essay argues that, for the planning profession, infrastructure is the organizational backbone around which basic principles, technical methods, professional norms, and even research are expressed. Interpreting its meaning liberally, infrastructure defines the very nature of planning. In turn, infrastructure requires planning, perhaps now more than ever. This symbiotic relationship between planning and infrastructure is unique and helps provide a clarity and focus that allow the profession to be sufficiently comprehensive without losing its meaning and purpose.

Sustainability is a serious concern for future transportation planning, but it should not be regarded as a straightforward problem with a simple but difficult solution. Achieving sustainability is a contextual and multi- dimensional process. Just as transportation pollutes the environment in a variety of ways and over a long period of time, addressing these pollut- ants requires a long-term, incremental, and multi-dimensional strategy to achieve sustainability. Genuine sustainability will likely take generations to achieve, but such a goal is most likely to be achieved through steady, incremental understanding and improvements in environmental impact. Given that sustainability is a long-term agenda, history is a useful and essential guide.

The growth of the Internet and the emerging ‘informational economy’ have especially stirred a renewed interest in technology’s role in urban formation, and this timely series of books from the Open University sounds an arrival of such discourses to the mainstream academic curricu- lum. The series emphasizes the relationship between technology and cities, yet it moves beyond a narrow focus on engineering innovation and technological determinism, emphasizing the importance of cultural and political factors in guiding and producing technologies.

Electronics and telecommunications are rapidly changing and are having significant impacts on social and economic activity, with major implications for transportation. Location of businesses and households may be altered as telecommunications options improve. Already, there is evidence that businesses have become less dependent on proximate locations as electronic links have become more effective alternatives to face-to-face communications. And while full-time telecommuting is relatively rare today, telecommunications systems do appear to enable many workers to “commute” from a home office on a part-time basis.

In an era when major physical infrastructure projects are increasingly hard to complete and yet travel demands have never been greater, information technology offers great promise in enhancing existing capacity with relatively minor adjustments to existing physical infrastructure. In implementing information technology, however, it is important to appreciate the political context. Seemingly ironic, learning from failure and improving on mistakes is actually crucial in technological innovation and progress.

Much of the developing world is experiencing rapid economic growth. Motor vehicle fleets in many megacities are doubling every seven years, creating a huge infrastructure backlog, escalating air quality problems, and imposing constraints on economic development. Besides rapid growth, the very context of transportation challenges is qualitatively different in the developing world. Leaded and unregulated fuels are a serious source of air pollution in cities like Bangkok, Lagos, and Jakarta. In Bombay, an estimated 50,000 squatters live within the rights-of-way of the city’s metro, forcing trains to crawl at under 5 km per hour in certain sections of the city. Excruciatingly slow train services have actually sparked riots among train passengers and the burning of train stations in protest. Heavy reliance on bicycle and other forms of non-motorized vehicles is another distinguishing feature of transportation in the developing world. In Tianjin, China, 80 percent of all commute trips are by non-motorized modes, mainly bicycles. While transportation management practices and technologies from advanced economies might find relevance in developing countries, the developed world can likewise learn much from economically less well-off places. For example, other parts of the world provide useful insights into such practices as price deregulation (e.g., Santiago), paratransit expansion (e.g., Mexico City), road pricing (e.g., Singapore), high-speed rail (e.g., Taiwan), build-operate-transfer projects (e.g., Hong Kong), creative infrastructure financing (e.g., betterment taxes in Bogota), and coordinated, integrated land development (e.g., land readjustment in Korea).

This technology needs assessment report of populations living in the Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) region addresses the root causes and dilemmas of the “digital divide” problem. This study addresses the central question: how can the Southeast Cities Technology Collaborative (SCTC) structure a regional intervention project that spearheads development in the productive use of information technology and benefits a low-income population with low educational attainment in Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) cities?

The study first provides a regional survey of the fiscal, institutional, and technological challenges facing this demographic region. The SELA region is a sub-section of Los Angeles County and comprised of eight cities and one unincorporated district: Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Maywood, South Gate, Vernon, Walnut Park, and the Florence-Firestone area. The demographic survey identifies that the SELA region has strong indicators of digital divide inequality.

The study further provides an assessment of existing digital divide intervention efforts in the SELA region: public access to computers and the internet at public schools, public libraries, nonprofit and community-based organization, city-initiated programs, and private for-profit services. The study takes account of community impressions and provides specific recommendations for institutional changes than can better integrate the population into a positive development process.

The study finds that investment in coordinating the integration of human capacity and technical infrastructure to network social service providers and users will support the social and economic advancement of the region. Investment in training school-age children, youth, and adults to harness the productive uses of information and telecommunications technology will yield the greatest benefits for future generations.

The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of these trends for transportation planning. More extensive discussions of the first nine trends and the issues they raise can be found in the detailed papers that follow this summary. The last three topics are not addressed in later papers here; separate studies are being conducted on these topics.

This paper and the papers it summarizes are intended to provide a review of key literature as well as background information and data on the topics covered. We clearly do not attempt to cover every possible trend that could affect the pace or location of growth and change in California – we do not discuss, for example, the possible effects of recession, competing demands for water, or whether the current problems with the state’s electric power supply will be lasting. Nor are the papers designed to offer policy advice, although we do sometimes suggest interpretations of the data that have policy significance. Finally, each paper is written to stand on its own as a summary of trends and issues for the particular topic it addresses. In preparing the individual papers, we have drawn upon a variety of sources and reflect sometimes-differing perspectives and interpretations of events and possibilities, as does the literature on the topics. We have not attempted to force consensus across the papers when it does not exist in the literature and data. We nevertheless hope that the materials here will stimulate discussion and further analysis as California transportation plans are being developed.

This paper presents an overview of a dozen trends that have potentially significant consequences for California and its transportation plan for the next twenty years. The twelve trends discussed in the paper are:

1. A Growing Population

2. Demographic Change

3. New Patterns of Employment

4. Housing Location, Type, and Affordability

5. Change in the Central Valley

6. Changing Passenger and Household Travel Demand

7. Changing Patterns of Freight Transport

8. New Technologies

9. The Environment

10. Equity and Participation

11. Sustainable Transportation

12. The Funding Dilemma