Using Scenario Planning to Prepare for Transportation Uncertainties in Rural and Regional Planning
1. Using Scenario Planning to Prepare for
Transportation Uncertainties in Rural and
Regional Planning
National Regional Transportation Conference
Heather Sauceda Hannon, AICP
Ryan Maye Handy, AICP Candidate
JULY 2022
3. How old will
you be?
What will your
life look like?
What will your
town look like?
Where will you be in 2040?
4. Foresight: Thinking about the future…
• Helps planners navigate change
• Prepares planners for an uncertain
future
• Develops a plan to understand
trends and prepare for them
9. Future forces, or drivers of change, are
things outside of your control that are
uncertain and can affect the future in a
changing world.
10. 3 Types of Scenario Planning
Questions
• Predictive: What do we think is going to
happen?
• Normative: How can we make something
desirable happen?
• Exploratory: What could possibly happen?
Outcomes
• Predictive: We assume we know what will
happen, so we pick actions that will help
• Normative: We pick actions that make a
desired future more likely, while hedging
for others
• Exploratory: We pick robust actions that
will help in the most plausible future
13. Driving Forces in Cooper, Kansas
Poverty
• High poverty rates: Can residents afford
cars?
• Smaller budgets: Can local governments
afford to fund public transit?
• Low employment: Do residents need to
travel elsewhere to work?
Aging
• Older residents: How do these residents
travel?
• Greater need for services: How do older
residents get access to services, like
medical care?
• Aging in place: Can older residents remain
in town?
15. Bleak Future A Good
Place for
Some
Growing
Pains
Good Things
Come to an
End
Scenarios for Cooper in 2040
Scenario 1 Scenario 2 Scenario 3 Scenario 4
16. Activity instructions
• Each group will get a scenario
• Read your scenario
• Discuss potential impacts related to
planning issues (20min)
• Discuss strategies that might help you
prepare/ avoid/ achieve/ mitigate
(20min)
If… Then…
19. 113 BRATTLE STREET CAMBRIDGE MA 02138 LINCOLNINST.EDU @LANDPOLICY
Thank you!
Heather Sauceda Hannon, AICP
hhannon@lincolninst.edu
Ryan Maye Handy, AICP Candidate
rhandy@lincolninst.edu
scenarioplanning.io
Hinweis der Redaktion
Who are we?
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a non-profit that seeks to improve the quality of life through the effective use taxation and stewardship of land.
The institute runs the Consortium for Scenario Planning, which offers a community of practice for practitioners, including access to technical assistance, educational resources, and a network of fellow innovators.
Structured approach to decision making that guides planners, community members, and other stakeholders through consideration of various futures that they and their plans might face.
Has its origins in the military and business communities, but has been used by city and spatial planners for decades. BECAUSE … SEE NEXT SLIDE
Our goal today is to put ourselves into the future and imagine its impacts on our communities. By envisioning what the future can bring, hopefully we can plan for it.
So to start, we’d like you to think about where will you be in the year 2040. How old will you be? How old will your friends and family members be? What will your life look like – will you be working, retired, a parent or grandparent? What will your town or community look like?
As planners, we can also envision what the futures of our communities look like. And increasingly, planners are turning to Foresight as a method to make sense of the future, navigate change, and prepare for uncertainty,
Great place to start thinking about trends that will affect your community’s future is the American Planning Association’s 2022 Trend Report for Planners, which was produced in partnership with the Lincoln Institute. The report breaks trends down into three categories – trends we need to act on now, trends to prepare for and trends to learn about and watch for. Scan the QR code on the screen to download a report. Expect the 2023 trend report to be released in January.
But once you understand the trends, how do you anticipate the impacts they will have on your community? This is where scenario planning comes in.
Structured approach to decision making that guides planners, community members, and other stakeholders through consideration of various futures that they and their plans might face.
Has its origins in the military and business communities, but has been used by city and spatial planners for decades. BECAUSE … SEE NEXT SLIDE
Scenario planning is not just guess work – it relies on data and indications of trends.
It is inclusive, and is made better by including many views and groups.
It can anticipate many outcomes, not just one.
As such, it helps communities identify strategies to manage risk.
This image, from the Philadelphia–area Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, depicts the way in which they have come to use scenario planning as an integral part of an ongoing planning cycle.
Remember, that XSP is part of a planning process. A community can identify driving forces, understand various scenarios, identify robust strategies and then implement them.
This depicts the scenario planning process as a cycle, which means that you’re not done the first time you do it. It’s an iterative process and you are continually adapting your plans and strategies based on how the future aligns with what you imagined. This is part of what makes scenario planning part of being resilient in the face of uncertainties. This shows some common steps, starting with identifying forces and trends, creating scenarios, and then developing strategies to take action so that you are prepared.
It’s important to remember that future forces, or drives of change, are out of our control and are often uncertain. These can include things like pandemics or hurricanes or economic downtowns. While we can’t prevent these forces from affecting our communities, we can try to influence how we respond to them.
Most scenario planning done today is some combination of these approaches, tailored to purpose. In doing so, participants in a planning process assess an established – or a prospective – vision and goals in light of future forces and expect to adjust decision making over time as uncertainty resolves.
Today, we are going to focus on EXPLORATORY SCENARIO PLANNING.
Today we are going to time travel to the fictional (but not implausible) place of Cooper, a town of 3,500 in eastern Kansas. Cooper is rural but would be about an hour from where we now sit. Like many towns in this region, Cooper was built around the railroad and largely supported by agriculture and farming. Cooper has some things going for it and against it – while it may struggle with unemployment and population decline, it has some things to offer, like a historic downtown core and an interest inventing itself.
We’ve selected two driving forces for Cooper: Poverty and Aging. Your work today will be to consider a scenario generated by these driving forces and think of some transportation-related solutions to address them.
Let’s start with poverty. High poverty rates in rural areas are common in the United States. Residents may not be able to afford cars, even though having access to a car might be crucial in an area with few medical, school, employment or grocery options.
Poverty can also impact the wealth of local governments and mean they are unable, for various reasons, to financially sustain traditional alternatives to private cars, such as fixed-route bus services. Even so, giving residents transportation options could ensure their access to good paying jobs and high-quality public schools , which may serve to draw new residents to the town.
And now let’s think about aging. The lack of transportation alternatives in many rural areas means access to essential services is limited, if not nonexistent. Some of these essential services, such medical care, are particularly crucial for aging populations. Nonetheless, aging small town residents might want to “age in place,” which they can’t do without mobility options that still give them access to the care and services they need in a rural area.
Mobility-on-demand services – funded by governments or organized by non-profits or other volunteer groups -- might ensure that older residents can reach the services they need and remain in their communities.
Our XSP Matrix. Here are the four scenarios generated by our driving forces, poverty and aging. On the vertical access, the upper-level scenarios have poorer populations; the lower levels have wealthier populations. On the horizontal access, the right-side scenarios have older populations; the left-side scenarios have younger populations.
We’ve given these matrix scenarios some catchier names so you can understand the fundamental problem that each scenario poses. Each table will be given one of these four scenarios to discuss in a group. Each group will brainstorm strategies to respond to your scenario. We will take a few minutes at the end of our session to share each group’s ideas.
City of San Francisco recently completed a normative scenario planning process. This image is taken from their ConnectSF plan showing the steps in the process.
They describe their process as a broad look at potential drivers of change that could influence how the future plays out so that people can be more prepared for both opportunities and risks that appear. They used SP to evaluate a variety of potential futures and determine what the community wanted the future to look like. The process helped people understand the driving forces of change and the collective choices they have to respond to these changes.
Want to learn more about scenario planning or get involved? The CSP maintains a network of practitioners, we host peer exchanges and an annual conference. We publish materials, run local workshops and have awards for research into the field.
