In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defined a “region” as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” A proposed rule published by the Obama administration would take the next step in this process, demanding that planning organizations for what were once multiple regions combine or coordinate to produce single regional plans for their now enlarged regions.
The rule states that if multiple metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) exist within a single urbanized area, they must merge or jointly prepare single transportation plans for their area. According to a DOT estimate, about a third of metropolitan planning organizations are affected by the proposed rule.
Congress requires that MPOs write and update two key plans: the long-range (20-year) transportation plan, which must be updated every five years; and the short-term (4-year) transportation improvement plan (TIP), a list of projects the MPO wants to fund, which must be updated every year. As defined by the Census Bureau, urbanized areas often cross state boundaries. However, since MPOs are designated by state governors, they generally do not cross state boundaries. This means the New York urbanized area has separate MPOs for the New York and New Jersey parts of the area, while the Philadelphia urbanized area has three separate MPOs. These would all have to work together to write single long-range plans and TIPs to submit to the federal government.
