Stats and the lies we tell ourselves.

In one of the more insidious bits of political data steering, the North Carolina General Assembly is proposing to limit the type of data used by planners to make predictions about sea level rise.  The limitation states that only past data can be used to make projections, not models.

It would be easy to bang on the head of these folks for being so naked in their manipulations.  They are avoiding making hard decisions in the hopes that the rising tide will just skip the entire state.  As a professional that uses statistics and projections and models to compel good planning decisions, this is infuriating.

But it is truly difficult to be completely offended because things like this happens all the time.  Jurisdictions pick and choose the most pleasant or self serving data to "prove" their points.  Many central cities have been throwing out projections for growth for the last fifty years, although they've been hemorrhaging people.  Adjustments are made to ridership projections to get new transit pushed through.  Even the average tree size is a little lie told to make things better when laying out a parking lot.  Those trees will never attain full growth, but we carry on like they will.

However, what should be disturbing to planners is that we most frequently do it ourselves.

One of the powerful tools that planners use to develop visions for communities is highlighting or suppressing feedback.  When we survey an area, experience and education tell us what to report back to the community and elected officials.  There's a little mysticism and a lot of training that help us pick out pathways and opportunities for development. Often, the things we don't like - big box retail or parking, to name a few - get suppressed in the name of planning orthodoxy.

Once it enters the black box of a planning mind, we do have biases that take over.  We are biased towards sustainability.  We are biased towards transit.  We are biased towards best practices.  Those are not minor data steering filters in their own right.  They run in the thousands of dollars for staff time, millions for lost opportunities, and billions for infrastructure.  It is not that these are incorrectly spent, but communities are steered towards these expenses without the benefit of complete information.

Indeed, it is easy to get angry at North Carolina when they are simply being overt about the self serving nature of data.  It's really easy because data steering is a power we planners want to keep for ourselves.