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with the complicity of the planning agency.  For example,

about 5 percent of U.S. urban transportation is by walking

or bicycling, and planning agencies usually go out of their

way to ensure that cyclists and pedestrians are represented

on advisory committees.  Some 85 to 90 percent of urban

transport is by auto, yet advisory committees rarely have

members explicitly representing drivers.  And advisory

committees do not have anyone explicitly representing the

taxpayers who will have to foot the bill.

The Department of Transportation describes focus groups

as "a way to identify customer concerns, needs, wants, and

expectations."77  But focus groups are really a sales tech-

nique, a way of finding out how to convince the public to

support planners' preconceived notions.  Through focus

groups, for example, planners may learn to use terms such as

"livability" when they mean "density" and "balanced trans-

portation" when they mean "increased congestion."

Scientific public opinion surveys can give useful

results if the questions are objectively worded.  But too

many planning surveys are unscientific, with leading ques-

tions and a self-selecting sample.  While noting that "in-

formal" surveys "tend to bring responses from . . . those

who are more personally interested in specific transporta-

tion issues," the Department of Transportation effectively

endorses such surveys by saying that they can "reach a

broader group than those who attend public meetings."78

Grassroots lobbying, through which planners explicitly

encourage people who support their views to participate in

planning, is implicit in many of the planning techniques and

has been endorsed by the Department of Transportation.  The

department calls the Minneapolis-St. Paul region's public

involvement program "exemplary" but chides planners for

failing "to build grassroots support for the multimodal

transportation philosophy."79  On the other hand, the de-

partment commends Seattle's planning agency for forming

"active partnerships with community and special interest

groups, including advocates for bicycle facilities."80

ISTEA's public involvement requirement is supposed to

bring transportation decisions out of the "back room" and

into the open where, supposedly, they will more accurately

reflect the public interest.  But if "back-room" decisions

were most responsive to highway contractors and developers,

the ISTEA planning process has often been captured by a

combination of central city officials, New Urbanists, rail

contractors, and cyclists and pedestrians, none of whom have

an interest in seeing reduced highway congestion.  As a