“Rather than adding broader regional considerations for the better,” says an op ed in yesterday’s Washington Examiner, metropolitan planning organizations have “empowered narrower parochial interests for the worse.” The writer is dealing specifically with the transportation planning organization for the Washington, DC, area, but his comments are valid for any of the hundreds of metropolitan planning organizations around the U.S.
Washington’s dysfunctional transportation system.
Flickr photo by magandafille.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “metropolitan planning organizations” or MPOs were created by federal decree in the 1960s. Basically, agencies giving out housing and transportation grants didn’t want to have to deal with separate grant proposals from each of the 20,000 or so cities and counties in the country. So they ordered all metropolitan areas — then about 250, now more than 400 — to form MPOs that would submit grant proposals for metro regions as a whole and then allocate the funds to local governments in those regions.
To maintain a semblance of democracy, the feds further dictated that each MPO be governed by a board consisting of elected officials from cities and counties representing a majority of the people in each metro area. Washington, DC’s MPO, which covers northern Virginia and southern Maryland, has more than 25 city commissioners, each of whom is on continual guard to insure that his or her city gets its share of the take.
Washington’s Metrorail system “is now old and broken, thanks to years of chronic underfunding,” says the op ed (something previously noted by the Antiplanner). “Service deteriorates and cars keep breaking down, as happened this week forcing track closures on both the Red and Orange/Blue lines.” Meanwhile, the MPO debates about the need for bicycle lockers at Dulles Airport.
The op ed writer, a government affairs director for AAA, argues that elected officials from Maryland shouldn’t have a say in what happens in Virginia and vice versa. He is right that the basic design of MPOs is guaranteed to turn transportation issues into a political circus. But the problems are broader and more serious than that.
First, the whole idea of long-range transportation planning is simply an illusion. Any agency trying to do such planning is automatically dysfunctional. As someone once said, there is a fine line between a vision and a hallucination, and long-range planners have crossed that line.
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Second, by handing out money like candy, the federal government has completely warped American transportation networks. There is no reason why transportation cannot be completely handled by market forces, no need for government to intervene except to insure that transportation systems are relatively safe and non-polluting (and even those things could be handled with properly designed markets). Federal involvement has instead turned transportation into a big chase for tax dollars with every state and community trying to get its “fair share” (meaning, of course, more than its fair share).
The Antiplanner’s long-term solution is to get the federal government out of the domestic transportation business. This means privatizing air traffic control and leaving highways, airports, and transit to state and local governments. But that’s not going to happen right away.
The Antiplanner’s short-term solution is to vastly simplify the allocation of federal funds. Right now, after deducting earmarks, federal surface transportation dollars (meaning your gas taxes) are divided into some three dozen pots, including at least ten highway pots and even more transit pots. Some pots can only be spent on roads, some only on transit, some are “flexible” (meaning either roads or transit), and some don’t really have much to do with transportation at all. Most of these funds are apportioned to states and metro areas using formulas that take into account such things as population densities, the taxes paid on Diesel fuel, and transit operating costs per passenger mile.
Forget about all this stuff. Forget about mandating that some money has to be spent on transit, some on highways, and some flexible. Just put it all into one big pot, and parcel it out to the states based on three things: population (45%), land area (5%), and transportation user fees collected by state and local governments (50%). To be a user fee, the fee must be collected from transportation users and spent on the use from which it was collected. Transit fares spent on transit are user fees; gas taxes and tolls spent on roads are user fees; transit fares spent on roads or gas taxes or tolls spent on transit are not user fees, nor are sales, property, or income taxes.
States and MPOs can’t control their land area and have little control over their population. But they have a lot of control over user fees. This formula will discourage them from funding transportation out of general taxes and encourage them to collect more user fees. The user fees, in turn, will make state and local transportation agencies more responsive to the users.
If a state or MPO wants to spend all its federal funds on rail transit, high-speed rail, or bridges to nowhere, let them do so. But that state or MPO will lose out to other states in the user-fee race, which means its share of future federal funding will decline. State and local areas will do best by emphasizing bus transit and toll roads to somewhere. In this way, rather than undermining market incentives, federal funding will strengthen them.
You can download my spreadsheet showing state-by-state 2006 highway and transit user fees (columns B through E), populations and land areas (columns G and I), federal gas taxes collected from each state (column K), the 2006 distribution of federal funds to each state (column O), and the distribution under the 50/45/5 formula (column M). This formula initially results in allocations that are fairly close to current distributions. You can play with the formula by changing the percentages in cells E56, G56, and I56; cell N56 shows the correlation between current and proposed allocations.
Initially, the main losers (see column R) will be big states with small populations (North & South Dakota, Wyoming), states with very low gas taxes (Georgia — see column S), and states with negligible transit systems (Alabama, Mississippi). New York and New Jersey are big winners because of their transit systems (and because current transit formulas cheat the cities with lots of transit ridership), but they would win even more if the stopped diverting highway fees to transit. DC is also a big winner, but only because I counted all the transit revenues collected in the Washington region to DC; a more precise calculation would only count revenues collected in DC.
ROT: To be a user fee, the fee must be collected from transportation users and spent on the use from which it was collected. Transit fares spent on transit are user fees; tolls spent on roads are user fees; transit fares spent on roads or tolls spent on transit are not user fees, nor are sales, property, or income taxes.
THWM: Then every one would have to pay tolls for every single mile that they drive, no matter what type of road it is.
THWM:
Then every one would have to pay tolls for every single mile that they drive, no matter what type of road it is.
The only practical way to do this is a per mile fee, mandated and collected by the government. Private toll companies don’t have the legal standing to enforce installing tamper-proof meters on vehicles, but the government does.
So back to Square One, e.g., the gummit being involved from top to bottom, one way or anutha’.
msetty said: The only practical way to do this is a per mile fee, mandated and collected by the government. Private toll companies don’t have the legal standing to enforce installing tamper-proof meters on vehicles, but the government does.
So back to Square One, e.g., the gummit being involved from top to bottom, one way or anutha’.
THWM: RFID chips or some other kind of tracking device could be implanted into Mr.O’Toole or Mr.Karlock for that matter.
THWM:
RFID chips or some other kind of tracking device could be implanted into Mr.O’Toole or Mr.Karlock for that matter.
RFID chips would have a practical use if I knew where Karlock was, so I could make sure I wasn’t there, but even the loyal opposition has privacy rights, so I couldn’t use gummit force to implant them. As for O’Toole, I already know where he is, and he I, most of the time!
msetty said: RFID chips would have a practical use if I knew where Karlock was, so I could make sure I wasn’t there, but even the loyal opposition has privacy rights, so I couldn’t use gummit force to implant them.
THWM: I know it’s just the whole big brother aspect be it private sector or public sector that’s watching, like you said back to square one with the government involved.
Mr.Setty I’ll agree with you that right now transport policy is a distorted mess, but at the same time Mr.O’Toole & Mr.Cox get paid to defend a distorted mess.
Antiplanner wrote:
“There is no reason why transportation cannot be completely handled by market forces, no need for government to intervene except to insure that transportation systems are relatively safe and non-polluting (and even those things could be handled with properly designed markets). ”
We had a safety system like that in the UK. The private rail company decided that they didn’t need to do more maintenance – their risk analysis said that it was not realistic to spend more. Unfortunately, their risk analysis was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. One of the sections of rail, on a high speed corner where the stresses are highest, was riddle with cracks. One day, as a train was passing over it, the metal shattered like a sheet of glass.
I’m not saying that you can avoid having to make tough decisions about whether extra safety on the railways can only be bought with less investment in the roads, and consequently less safety there. But it has to be decided by government – that’s why they get elected.
Antiplanner[sic]: even those things could be handled with properly designed markets
THWM: A “designed market”, is not a “free market”.
We had a safety system like that in the UK. The private rail company decided that they didn’t need to do more maintenance – their risk analysis said that it was not realistic to spend more.
Right.
We have the same plethora of examples here why the Free Market fetish is a fantasy: look at any utility company and chances are good that they have often cut back on maintenance with power outages as a result. But of course we can trot out Enron and Bechtel and call the ideologue argument hogwash.
DS
Seemingly almost daily, events on the ground conspire to refute the assertions of some ideologies, don’t they?
DS
“the whole idea of long-range transportation planning is simply an illusion.”
So like a program like FasTracks in Denver is an illusion? 😉
“Federal involvement has instead turned transportation into a big chase for tax dollars with every state and community trying to get its “fair share†(meaning, of course, more than its fair share).”
It’s a sad thing to see. We see part of the public debate on projects become “well, if we don’t do this we’ll loose out on the money”. For example, the Northstar Line in Minnesota was originally planned to connect Minneapolis and St. Cloud. Over the course of a decade or two of talking about it, MN didn’t get it rolling enough to apply for Federal funding that would’ve chipped in a large portion on the upfront costs. At the time the argument that it needs to be done now so we could get that money. That is, it wasn’t about if it was worth doing because of ridership but because we needed to get the money. I thought this was a transit project, not an exercise in maximizing federal payments.
Because the project didn’t get to the right stage soon enough before the Feds tightened up their standards (probably because of everyone and their grandmother wanting to build some rail line of their own with Fed dollars), only about 1/2 to 2/3 of the line qualified for Federal funds (Minneapolis to Big Lake). What is the outcome? No, you don’t see much of anything that amounts to “well, maybe the ridership for the rest just wasn’t high enough to warrant spending hundreds of millions on that portion”. No, it became about the money we could’ve had.
We see this sort of thing with roads too, I69 in Indiana and I66 (?) in Kentucky are too good examples.
I don’t think local and state governments could have designed and built the interstate highway system – do you?
there something else you missed also with regard to MPO transportation planning and that is that they must, by law, not have any more projects on their build list than they have actual funding for. In other words, no wish lists which is what we have at the State and Local levels if left to their own devices.
What do you think causes the deterioration of METRO?
is it a lack of adequate funds?
is the Anti-Planner advocating increasing taxes to pay for transportation?
and if this is done. who should decide what projects to build?
but how about this?
the Federal gas tax is all used up. The only money left is for maintenance of existing roads (remember all those roads we say we already paid for? well..one small problem.. they have to be maintained…and guess what..that costs money).
okay so the Feds are out of money and so are most states including Va and Md… so what is your solution for new roads?
Should we raise taxes and should we build toll roads?
and in we build tolls roads.. do we want them built by the private sector or by “government”..you know…the DOTs.. like VDOT.
pick your poison… taxes or tolls.. what say folks?
I don’t want to defend bureaucracies … because the point about dozens of pots of money, each with different rules about use… etc .. are basically true and the standard Fed practice of taxing you then sending it back to you but with strings attached.
there’s good and bad with that practice.
but what REALLY is the duty of the MPO?
to coordinate transportation that can only be done at the regional level.
the monies destined for the localities is basically pass-through money at the MPO level.
but here’s what MPOs must do by law. They cannot have so-called “wish” lists.
they can only have in their transportation plan – projects that they have identified funding for.
and they cannot by law – arbitrarily take projects off the build list and substitute other ones – without a vote and without having adequate funding.
in other words – they must plan the transportation infrastructure…
blaming the MPO for a lack of funding for METRO is what?
dumb as toast?
Is the MPO directly responsible for funding?
Do you want the MPO to have the power to tax?
if you don’t then why blame the MPO for funding issues for METRO?
I think it is real, real easy to take potshots at the MPOs.. there is certainly much fertile ground but the alternative to not regionally plan is what?
Well all limited access roads should be charging tolls in first place.