The Fourth Regional Plan Plots a Course for the New York Region

The Regional Plan Association (RPA), an urban research and advocacy organization working in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region, has released its Fourth Regional Plan, following previous iterations released in 1929, the 1960s, and 1996.

The Fourth Regional Plan, subtitled "Making the Region Work for All of Us," pursues four values (Equity, Health, Prosperity, and Sustainability) in four action areas (Fix the institutions that are failing us, Create a dynamic, customer-oriented transportation network, Rise to the challenge of climate change, and Make the region affordable for everyone).

Several publications picked up on the news of the Fourth Regional Plan, usually focusing on the details of one of the four action plans. Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan writes for Fast Company about the plan's focus on governance. According to Campbell-Dollaghan, it's the first of the four plans to focus so specifically on government.

Writing for Streetsblog NYC, David Meyer focuses on the Fourth Regional Plan's recommendations for transit investments. "There are essentially two phases to RPA’s transit vision," explains Meyer, "bringing the existing system up to snuff, and expanding it to handle the demands of a growing population." Writing for City Limits, Jarrett Murphy finds a particularly tantalizing detail of the Fourth Regional Plan's transit recommendations: switching the New York Subway system to a 2/3 system, running for 24 hours a day only on the weekends.

The livestream and public event that commemorated the release of the Fourth Regional Plan has also generated a lot of commentary on Twitter at #4thplan. The RPA has been teasing the release of the Fourth Regional Plan for years now—most recently with a report that recommended a wave of transit oriented developments near suburban rail stations, released earlier in November. Chasity Cooper also published a review of the three previous plans the day before the RPA released the Fourth Regional Plan.