Who are these transportation planners of whom you speak? And to what extent do they manifest their advocacy, and how big is their advocacy in relation to whom? I suspect “planners” are similar to what one hears about on financial news segments, where “analysts” predicted that xyz’s profits would be 50% in the next quarter, xyz predicted that their profits would be 25%, the profits were actually 40%, so even though the company did better than the company expected, since the analysts’ mistaken prediction was higher than the actual result the company’s stock goes down.
I don’t believe you should talk about planners without also including those who control the purse strings, whether they be officers of private corporations or congress critters. They perform some role which effects transportation progress, even when it involves little planning. When UPS decides to buy 5000 trailer train compatible trailers or containers vs 1 cargo carrying 747 airplane, that effects transportation just as a department of transportation or regional planning commision or university professor figuring the dollars or btu’s per ton per mile of rail vs highway vs air freight, or even legislation of x dollars of tax credit for transportation investment.
the short answer is I don’t know. I did say “hopefully”, so I’m pretty much talking about a perfect world where reasonable people use a reasonable scientific method to find out what works, and we don’t continually reinvent the wheel, or as Henry6 nicely put it, throw out babies and bathwater and try to resurrect them later.