MPOs Have Scope, But No Power

Thanks for paying attention to this issue. Fortunately (or unfortunately), we appear to have 18 months to rethink our concept of MPOs. MPO PL funds are among the only consistent Federally-funded urban planning programs operating in the United States. It is time to better leverage this money to develop our regions in a more coherent fashion.

It is very unlikely that MPOs will get land use authority from the Federal government, so we should look toward promoting coordination instead. There is a mismatch between the agency responsible for transportation planning and land use. If the two agencies can come closer together through a hosting arrangement or at least coterminous boundaries, coordination will be much easier.

Current Federal law loosely organizes MPOs around urbanized areas, which are created by the Census Bureau and pay no regard to political boundaries. The end result is that often the MPO’s plan only covers a portion of a local government. So how can we expect the local governments to coordinate their land use map with the transportation plan? I propose that MPOs be organized around metropolitan statistical areas instead. MSA’s are coterminous with counties, and that means the MPO would always cover entire units of local government. Further, the geographically-larger MPOs will come much closer to the boundaries of Councils of Government and NAAQS Conformity airsheds. Establishing MPOs based on MSAs more accurately reflects the true boundaries of a region, while simultaneously reducing the total number of MPOs nationwide.

You are absolutely right that MPOs need the authority to issue bonds and fund programs of their own. Recently, a Florida MPO discovered that no mechanism existed for the MPO to supplement a traffic-operations program called the "Road Rangers" that was cut back in the state budget. The draft reauthorization introduced to the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit includes several provisions for MPOs to build their own projects, so there is a good chance MPOs will have some authority in this area soon.