The Underrepresentative MPO

I’ve always felt Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) underrepresented major cities and population centers around the country, leaving us with boards that were more likely to care about how to go through a city than how to get to it or move around in it. I feel like that’s how we’ve gotten a lot of these massive highway expansions in cities that don’t do much to address people’s actual transportation insufficiency.

Adie Tomer talked about this briefly on our podcast related to an idea Brookings has about regional block grants and allocating more money to regions instead of state DOTs. One thing Adie noted was the idea that cities aren’t getting their fair share of money is that if MPOs have more money, they would be able to do more collaboration and think more about regionalism.

“I think we see a lot of the MPO board tension because it becomes, especially if you’re like in that Houston example, hey, I’m out voted, what am I even doing here? I think if we throw a big bag of money in the middle of the proverbial table, if not literal table, then I think folks are actually gonna collaborate a lot more…

…Holding your coalition together is hard. You win the grant, the coalition will continue. Right? So we think of the regional block grant program, whether it’s transportation or bigger. This is a way to actually incentivize full follow through on regionalism, folks working together on a day-to-day basis on big ideas at the metro scale.”

We’re not just talking about transportation policy, but water, energy, broadband, and other types of infrastructure that if we start thinking regionally there’s a lot of money that can be part of a collaborative interconnected effort. Nothing exists completely in a silo but there are real constraints that come from always fighting for money.

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