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.Metropolitan Planning Organizations.These transportation planningagencies, known as MPOs, which the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1962required in all metropolitan areas of over 50,000 population, are re-sponsible for  continuing, comprehensive, and cooperative planning fortransportation.Most important, they are responsible for allocating fed-eral and state transportation funding within their regions.Annually theyadopt multiyear transportation improvement programs, similar in manyways to local capital improvement programs.Because their establishment came during the period of founding re-gional land use planning agencies, the two types of functions frequentlywere combined in one agency framework.The combination suggestsclose working relationships between the two.But MPOs are differentfrom regional planning councils in having some board members ap-pointed by state governors and being closely affiliated with state trans-REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT 235portation agencies rather than local elected leaders.Also, more andmore MPOs have spun off from regional planning councils.MPOs have not proven to be as successful at coordinating and coop-erating as hoped.As planning agencies they have no implementing pow-ers; other state and local agencies carry out plans.States play a mercu-rial role, sometimes wielding power by changing priorities or droppingand adding projects at will.In fact, since 1982, states have been free toformulate and monitor their own programs to leave their hands untiedby MPO programs.MPOs, like regional planning agencies, also haveproblems with regional boundaries.A transportation study recently com-pleted for the U.S.301 corridor in five Maryland counties east of Wash-ington, D.C.contended with three MPOs, each with jurisdiction overpart of the area.The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of1991 was intended to improve matters.It calls for considering multi-modal transportation options in planning for improvements, shapingtransportation programs to reflect funding limits, recognizing relation-ships between land use and transportation, and involving communityresidents and interests in the planning process.The act prodded MPOsto plan more broadly and program improvements more realistically tomeet metropolitan development needs.Some state transportation de-partments and MPOs have resisted the act s call for more comprehensiveand inclusive planning.State transportation departments, in particular,have been powerful agencies well connected to state legislators, con-struction contractors, and others with stakes in doing business as usual.Other state transportation departments and MPOs have responded posi-tively to ISTEA objectives in launching far-reaching planning studies andprograms.The U.S.301 corridor transportation study offers an example of the new wave of transportation planning.The 50-mile highway corridorthrough five fast-growing Maryland counties east of Washington, D.C.was originally proposed as an eastern by pass for the Washington region.Environmentalists and others, alarmed by the highway s potential stim-ulation of regional sprawl development, successfully killed the proposal.Subsequently, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT),working with environmental groups, formulated a different planning ap-proach.A broadly representative task force was convened to work withMDOT in fashioning a transportation plan that would integrate multi-modal travel options, supportive land use patterns, and conservation ofenvironmental resources.After three years of effort, over 200 meetings, and evaluation of morethan a dozen alternative transportation/land use scenarios, the task forceconcluded that massive transportation investments would fail to resolve236 8.REGIONAL AND STATE GROWTH MANAGEMENTlong-term highway congestion unless accompanied by effective transitand travel demand management programs and by land use policies thatwould concentrate growth and attract economic development to balanceresidential development.The 1996 report of the task force recom-mended a broad range of highway and transit improvements and traveldemand management actions, to be supported by substantial changes inlocal land use policies to promote compact development in designatedgrowth areas and limit rural sprawl.10These kinds of land use recommendations had been made in otherregional transportation studies to little effect, since neither MPOs nor re-gional planning councils controlled land use policies and regulations.Sothe U.S.301 task force made two additional recommendations to putteeth in their plan.It recommended that major state investments intransportation improvements should be conditioned on the strengthen-ing of local land use policies to provide positive support for transporta-tion improvements.And it recommended formation of an intergovern-mental working group to coordinate and monitor state and local actionsin implementing the plan, essentially to bridge the jurisdictional gapsamong the three MPOs in the area, MDOT and other state agencies, andthe five counties and two municipalities involved.Thus the U.S.301 plan recognized the need for multijurisdictional co-ordination to achieve its objectives for transportation and land use in thecorridor.With the governor s affirmation of the recommendations, andthe working group in place, hopes are high that significant integrationbetween transportation and land use will be achieved over the next 25years [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]