Combining MPOs Won’t Fix Planning Failures

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.

In addition, the Census Bureau sometimes merges or splits urbanized areas from one census to the next. For example, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach were three separate urban areas in 1990 but were combined into one for the 2000 census. They still have three metropolitan planning organizations, so if the new rule is approved, those three would either merge into one or have to work together to write a single long-term transportation plan and a single TIP.

Other MPOs in Florida would also be affected. Tampa (Hillsborough County) and St. Petersburg (Pinellas County) each have their own MPOs yet are in the same urbanized area. The Florida Department of Transportation has objected to the proposal saying that 22 out of the state’s 27 MPOs are affected, a greater share than any other state. The Pinellas MPO also protested the rule, calling it “a heavy-handed, federal- and state-centric approach to transportation governance.”

The administration argues that the rule would make planning more “efficient, comprehensible and focused” and would achieve “economies of scale.” MPOs, however, feel blindsided by the proposal, as they had recently completed a two-year process working with the Department of Transportation to update planning rules and this proposal was never mentioned during that process.
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The rule upsets many due to local jealousies and fears that plans will unduly favor one city or another. For example, if West Palm Beach is growing faster than Miami, its transportation needs would be different, but the West Palm Beach MPO likely fears that Miami would have undue control over a joint plan.

One writer claims that the “Department of Transportation seeks to merge any MPOs whose urbanized areas share a boundary into one, large MPO.” That would mean, he claims, that the Springfield, Massachusetts MPO would have to merge with the New York City MPO because the former shares a boundary with the Hartford MPO which shares a boundary with the New Haven MPO which shares a boundary with the Bridgeport MPO which shares a boundary with the New York City MPO. This is an great exaggeration; unless the Census Bureau redefines all of those urban areas into one, which is unlikely, they would not be affected by the rule.

What’s really going on is a clash between ideology and politics. If you believe regional planning is efficient, then you probably believe that larger regions are more efficient than smaller ones. If you believe planning is highly politicized and most local government agencies (including cities, counties, highway departments, and transit agencies) lie, cheat, and steal to get a greater share of the federal pie, then those agencies will want regions to be as small as possible so their voices won’t be lost in the din.

The federal government originally required the creation of MPOs and regional plans because it didn’t want to have to deal with separate grant applications from the more than 3,000 counties and 19,000 cities in the country. While the MPOs were only supposed to coordinate grant applications, many have become major governmental powers themselves, keeping local governments in line by threatening to deny them transportation funds if they don’t go along with the MPO’s plans.

The Antiplanner, of course, believes that regional planning doesn’t work at all, and the larger the region the more dysfunctional. Rather than demand the creation of new levels of government, the feds should just stop funding local highways and transit. If the feds fund transportation at all, it should be in the form of formula funds to each state, so there would be no need to deal with grant applications and approvals. Then it would be up to the states to parcel out the funds to local governments, and the MPOs can disband.

Comments on the proposed rule were originally due on August 27. Due to protests from the MPOs, the comment period has been extended to October 24.