M. Solof - Public Affairs Writing & Editing

The United States may be one nation under God but, politically, it is fractured into a multitude of jurisdictions — states, counties, municipalities, school districts, election wards and more. While necessary for governance, taxation and administration of public services, these jurisdictions, for the most part, bear little relation to the distribution of population and economic activity across the landscape.

Over the last century, the settlement of land in ever-widening rings around the nation's major cities has created regional economies that span local government boundaries and often state lines. In effect, the invisible hand of the market has shaped the man-made landscape with little regard to the formal divisions decreed by government.

The federal government has recognized this organic, market-driven growth process by identifying over 300 "metropolitan areas" across the country. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, each consists of "a core area containing a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities having a high degree of economic and social integration with that core."

The federal government has also recognized that the integrity and vitality of these areas are dependent on the large-scale circulation of goods and people over regionwide transportation networks. Yet the fragmented political authority in most metropolitan areas makes it difficult to address regional transportation impacts and needs.

For over two decades, the federal government has sought to address this failing by requiring states to establish Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), composed of local elected officials and state agency representatives, to review and approve transportation investments in metropolitan areas.The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority is the MPO for northern New Jersey.

But because they bridge traditional boundaries and lines of authority, from the start, MPOs have been controversial. Critics have argued that they usurp legitimate functions of state governments and constitute an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Supporters say they are important mechanisms for insuring local control over federal funding and that they deserve wider authority to implement the plans they create.

Congress, while consistently upholding the need for MPOs, periodically has refined their functions and authority. During the fall of 1997, it was in the midst of doing so again as it considered reauthorizing the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, the enabling legislation for MPOs .

To provide historical perspective on this Congressional debate, the NJTPA published a series of three articles on the history of MPOs which appeared in the NJTPA Quarterly during 1996 and 1997. The articles made use of secondary sources to sketch the origins and administrative history of MPOs in the context of the broader developments in the nation, government and the field of regional planning. This publication provides the full text of the history series with added source notes and a bibliography.

Chapter 1 - Origins of Regional Planning: 1900-1940

Growth of the nation's metropolitan areas was made possible and sustained by improvements in the transportation system. In the 19th century, canals and then railroads helped knit together local and regional markets into a single national economy. Cities with long-established marine ports such as New York and those situated at the hub of major rail routes such as Chicago became the command centers for the emerging national economy. Their industries took in raw materials and fed back finished goods to the rest of the nation. They also served as the headquarters of new business organizations, nationwide in scope, which generated growing numbers of well paying jobs, swelling the ranks of the middle class.

As the cities prospered, they drew in waves of immigrants from around the globe. Soon, new innovations in transportation — horse-drawn railways, electric streetcars and finally, the automobile — provided the circulation systems needed for further growth, spreading population and productive capacities into wide regions around the urban core. Each city came to sit "like a spider in the midst of its transportation web," according to Lewis Mumford.

Imposing order on the rapid and often chaotic growth of metropolitan areas initially became the cause of Progressive Era reformers, academics and specialists in the new field of city planning. While their most visionary plans were never realized, they conducted important studies of regional needs and laid the groundwork for eventual federal programs to support comprehensive regional planning. This chapter traces the origins of regional planning in the first decades of the century.

Progressive Roots

Recognition of the need for planning on a regional scale has its roots in the "Progressive Era," roughly
the first two decades of the century. This was a time of great optimism for the growing middle class, when science was seen as offering the path to a more prosperous, efficient and orderly future. Applying scientific principles, industry helped satisfy material wants through mass production of goods and helped ease domestic burdens with a succession of new electric appliances.

Meanwhile, a new intellectual elite of "social" scientists promoted the reorganization of public and private institutions along more rational lines. In consort with business leaders and reform-minded politicians, this elite initiated a variety of crusades to improve the lot of the mass of people, economically and socially. They advocated government run by civil servants, breakup of monopoly companies, "home economics," compulsory education beyond grade school and prohibition of alcohol.

One of the great challenges faced in the Progressive Era was massive urbanization. Cities were growing rapidly as a result of both unprecedented immigration as well as the influx of population from rural areas. Social reformers, taking aim at overcrowded and unhealthful living conditions, pressured city governments to institute sanitation and building codes. Later they fought haphazard development patterns, including the siting of commercial and industrial facilities in residential neighborhoods. In response, cities drew up plans for segregating land uses and instituted the first zoning ordinances to enforce them.

Cities were also expanding outwardly. Many families fled inner-city crowding to homes in suburbs that had access to city jobs via streetcar or commuter rail lines. By the 1920s, as automobile ownership grew, wider areas were opened up to settlement, with many rural villages transformed by a wave of housing development for urban commuters. Most of this growth occurred with little forethought or government intervention. Indeed, existing government structures could only address the trends on a piecemeal basis and, as a result, many problems were left unaddressed including mounting highway congestion, polluted rivers, disappearing open spaces and inadequate water and sewer systems. It was only natural that the

Progressive Era emphasis on promoting rational organization would be brought to bear on the growing dispersion of population and economic activity in broad regions around major cities.

Practical Needs

The first efforts at regionwide planning began in the 1920s. While academics provided the theory and social science tools for regional planning (see sidebar p. 8), practical considerations motivated their use. For instance, by the end of World War I, a long-running dispute between New York and New Jersey over rail freight business reached a point where only a solution at a regional scale was possible. The dispute centered on rates charged by rail companies that encouraged goods to be moved from rail terminals in New Jersey to ships berthed in New York. New Jersey claimed the rates limited the development of maritime business on its side of the port. At one point, a lawsuit threatened, Solomon-like, to split the port into two zones, reducing its ability to efficiently serve shippers and leading to the loss of business to other East Coast ports.

New York business leaders recognized the threat and proposed a new bi-state agency to provide unified planning and policies for the port. Backed by the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, the business leaders finally succeeded in 1921 in getting the two states to create the Port of New York Authority (later to become the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). The authority was the first interstate governmental body in the nation and the first special-purpose "authority" with power to issue bonds and make investments while insulated from political control. In its first year, the Port of New York Authority set about developing a comprehensive plan for improving the entire port with new terminals and connections among rail lines

As this ambitious port plan took shape, other planning efforts were initiated to address a host of emerging regional-level problems. Again, New York area business leaders, together with a growing number of professional city planners, broke important ground. In the early 1920s, the Russell Sage Foundation appointed a committee to develop a "Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs." The work grew into a massive undertaking, including extensive surveys, data collection and economic projections, focusing upon New York City and 500 communities in three states within commuting distance of Manhattan. The pioneering work would continue for most of the decade during which most other major cities in the U.S. initiated similar "comprehensive" regional plans.

The first volume of the New York plan was issued in 1929 and presented recommendations on nearly every aspect of regional development, including calls for the development of satellite cities in outlying areas, the control of land-use to preserve open spaces and the construction of new rail and highway networks.

Implementation of such a far reaching plan was problematic. The authors hoped that the logic of their recommendations would do much to promote voluntary compliance by affected governments in the tri-state region. A private planning organization, the Regional Plan Association, was created to promote this compliance and conduct follow-up research.

However, the experience of the Port of New York Authority did not bode well for achieving voluntary compliance. Lacking power to force cooperation among the highly competitive freight rail companies in the region, the Port Authority was blocked in implementing many elements of its plan for creating an integrated freight rail network.

Critics argued that the recommendations of the Regional Plan of New York, and of comprehensive plans elsewhere in the country, would be similarly blocked by the competing interests of local governments. One planning professor, Thomas Reed, in 1925 contended that the only way to insure effective regional planning was the creation of "areawide" governments with power over municipalities in setting policies for regional infrastructure.

The Great Depression

Questions about the implementation of comprehensive plans in New York and other cities became all but moot in the face of the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Where toll or other dedicated funding sources were available or where the federal government would foot the bill, selected infrastructure projects recommended by regional plans were built. The New York region fared particularly well, with the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel and other major transportation facilities built in the 1930s.

But, by-and-large, visions of promoting orderly urban regions with planned communities and efficient infrastructure systems, were abandoned as cities struggled with desperate social and economic conditions.

Still, the regional planning experience of the 1920s exerted an important continuing influence. Through the empirical techniques of the social sciences, planning efforts in major cities had documented the regional nature of many social and economic problems. In doing so, they also created a strong case for new institutions and decision-making mechanisms such as authorities and regional planning commissions to supplement fragmented political structures.

The federal government, for its part, carried the torch of regional planning forward as it intervened to revive the economy in the 1930s. President Roosevelt, with great interest in natural conservation, encouraged and supported cooperative planning by governments in river valleys to address flood control, soil erosion and other shared needs. He also initiated a massive federal experiment in regional planning by creating the Tennessee Valley Authority which addressed not only water resources issues but electrification, agricultural improvement, housing and economic development.

Many New Deal programs were administered regionally and encouraged cooperation among local officials. The Public Works Administration, in particular, helped state and local governments develop the planning capabilities needed for large-scale infrastructure projects. But there was a catch. Planning was to be in accordance with national standards as a condition for the receipt of federal infrastructure aid. This requirement set the pattern for future intergovermental relations: the federal government used aid as a lever for promoting achievement of national goals and for persuading state and local governments to look beyond their narrow self-interests in making infrastructure and social investments.

Chapter 2 - Regional Responses to the Suburban Land Rush: 1940-1969

At the end of World War II, America was transformed by rapid suburbanization which brought housing, retail and other development sprawling out in every direction around major urban centers. As the transformation proceeded, public and private leaders recognized that existing government structures were inadequate to deal with the problems that arose — not the least of them, inadequate transportation, water and other infrastructure systems, the loss of open spaces and the decline of urban neighborhoods.

This recognition prompted the creation of numerous regional planning bodies. With regulatory and financial backing by the federal government, these bodies by the 1960s took on a variety of official planning functions for their regions. Still, they were seldom able to exert influence over the land use decisions of local governments or the transportation decisions of state agencies which helped drive the continuing suburban land rush.

This chapter traces the post-war developments in regional planning that set the stage for the formal establishment of MPOs in the early 1970s.

Preparing a New Future

During World War II, government and industry leaders were keenly aware of the need to plan for the post-war period. After a decade or more of pent-up demand for housing and consumer goods, the nation was poised for an unprecedented peacetime economic boom. However, the leaders knew that if this demand was not capitalized upon effectively, the nation could easily slip back into the unemployment and stagnation of the pre-war years.

Thus, alongside the patriotic fervor for the war effort, planning for a new post-war America became a national preoccupation. In a number of major cities regional alliances were launched in which public officials joined forces with private industry and surrounding local governments to chart strategies for their post-war future. Their efforts were supported at the federal level by the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), until it was disbanded by Congress in 1943. The agency urged a "comprehensive" approach to post-war planning that would make use of surveys and community forums and recognize "the interrelatedness of problems of population, economic activities, social patterns [and] physical arrangements."

But by and large the alliances paid little heed to urgings of NRPB for comprehensive planning-or even to the lessons learned in the 1920s about the problems of unfettered regional growth. The dominant view was that, if regions were to seize the coming economic opportunities, bold initiatives would be required. Rather than engage in the cautious planning advocated by the NRPB, most regional alliances focused upon preparing housing, business development and infrastructure projects that could be quickly implemented with the war's end.

Planning new freeways became a favored activity. Many of the regional transportation systems envisioned were straight out of the General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair — cities linked and served by networks of congestion-free, limited-access highways that presumably would make the nation's crowded and run-down mass transit systems a thing of the past. In 1944, Congress gave its endorsement to this "motor age" vision with initial authorization for construction of a nationwide interstate highway system. If the nation was to move boldly into the future, apparently it would do so solely by automobile.

Suburban Land Rush

By the end of 1946, 10 million men and women were discharged from the armed services and new family formation rose to a record 1.4 million per year. The need for new housing to accommodate them reached near-crisis proportions. The national housing agency estimated that five million new housing units were needed immediately and 12.5 million would be needed over the next decade.

Private developers jumped at the opportunity. Using pre-fabricated materials, cookie-cutter plans and standardized construction techniques to create "tract" housing developments, the developers sought to attract veterans — with their generous GI mortgage benefits — and middle class urban dwellers eager to enjoy the privacy and amenities of new, detached suburban homes.

The most aggressive and successful of the private developers was Levitt and Sons, who transformed potato farms on Long Island into the 17,000-home Levittown, creating the model for similar communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. By 1950, according to one estimate, Levitt was producing one four-room house every 16 minutes.

But blacks and other minorities were generally not welcomed. Even after 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that clauses in sales agreements discriminating against minorities were unenforceable, many contracts still contained them and realtors and developers used "steering" and other methods to keep non-whites out of prime suburban locations.

Still, in all, three-fifths of all new housing in the late 1940's was built in the suburbs. On the heels of the suburban housing boom, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses sought out suburban locations, resulting in an increas- ing dispersion of economic activity that had long been compacted in and around major cities.

The dispersion, in addition to meeting the material and employment needs of the new suburbanites, was viewed by military officials as having strategic benefits, making the nation's population and productive capacities less vulnerable to nuclear attacks against major cities. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright put it bluntly: "The urbanite must either be willing to get out of the city or be resigned to blowing up with it." This cold-war calculus provided further impetus to national-level support for a continuing suburban land rush.

Federal Planning Aid

Inevitably, many rural communities faced growing pains in accommodating waves of new residents. In some areas, the pains became outright sickness. Symptoms included poorly laid-out housing developments and inadequate schools, roads and water and sewer systems. Many homeowners also faced their share of woes from slapdash building methods, including leaky roofs and faulty sewer hookups. Planner and historian Lewis Mumford, surveying the growing chaos in many areas, termed it "the suburban fallout from the metropolitan explosion."

The nation's cities, too, were shaken. The loss of middle class residents and business further exacerbated the social and economic problems that had received scant attention through the long years of economic depression and then war.

Congress responded with major housing legislation, first in 1949 and again in 1954. The acts primarily supported continued suburban development, with financing and insurance programs benefiting both homebuyers and builders. But the acts also authorized federal aid to cities for urban renewal and public housing and supported new regional planning efforts. Section 701 of the 1954 Act for the first time gave federal grants for councils of governments and other metropolitan planning agencies to promote cooperation in analyzing and addressing regional problems.

Testifying before Congress, urban planning professor Robert Mitchell argued that such planning aid was needed to build "awareness that central cities and suburbs are interdependent and cannot survive in the present governmental and physical chaos."

The federal aid proved popular, prompting the formation of nearly 100 metropolitan planning bodies. Yet, while the new agencies improved intergovernmental cooperation, they generally were hamstrung by their inability to directly shape local government land use policies. Indeed, many local officials supported regional planning only to the extent that it would sustain their capacity to accommodate the windfall of development projects coming their way.

Some communities chose to go it alone, hiring consultants to develop master plans that would rein in the more disorderly aspects of growth. The extreme case was the community of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, which purchased all the town's vacant, developable land to be parceled out only for those projects that fit the sensibilities of its wealthy residents.

Interstate Highways

The ambivalence on the part of local officials towards regional planning changed dramatically with the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act. The legislation authorized construction of the multi-billion dollar, 41,000 mile interstate highway system as well as providing aid for primary, secondary and lesser roads. The system constituted the largest construction program in the nation's history, on the scale of 60 Panama Canals. With the choice of routes left up to state highway departments, many local officials found new cause to embrace cooperation through metropolitan planning agencies to avoid having routes imposed on them and to gain bargaining clout in negotiations with their states.

Still, the resulting cooperation had few of the features of the comprehensive regional planning advocated years earlier by the NRPB when the interstate system was conceived. Rather much of the "planning" was of a narrow, technical nature focusing on routing alignments. Despite the urging of the planning community, the Act did not require routes to conform to metropolitan plans already in place or to give consideration to crucial land use issues, such as how particular routes could open up wide areas to new waves of suburban development and sprawl. Also the Act all but neglected the further damage that could be done to urban transit systems, which already were pitched into a steep decline due to competition with the automobile.

The decision to forge ahead with the massive interstate highway system with only dim recognition of its potential consequences partly stemmed from the influence on Congress of those with something to gain from the system — the defense establishment, developers, auto manufactures, oil companies, state and local engineers and others.

But it also reflected a peculiarly-1950s outlook about the future. It was a decade of national self-assurance when American industrial and military might dominated much of the world. Any challenges which might appear on the horizon, the view went, would yield to technology and American ingenuity.

Faith in the future was also strong among transportation officials in the 1950s. Even the demise of mass transit systems was seen as amenable to technical fixes. For instance, a 1956 Brookings Institution report stated that "In the coming decade the development of regional mass transportation by helicopter or convertiplane may provide the longer distance commuting services now provided by interurban buses and commuter rail lines."

All this added up to a confidence in building large-scale projects in the name of progress, leaving the consequences to be sorted out later. It was an outlook personified in "master builder" Robert Moses who, from the 1930s on, oversaw the construction of major highways, bridges and parkways in and around New York City — as he lashed out at "ivory tower planners" for being preoccupied with potential complications.

Three-C Planning

By the late 1950s, the effects of a decade or more of rapid suburban growth began to dampen the widespread "build it now" enthusiasm. Many planners and public officials were alarmed at the nation's changing landscape. In 1958, planner William Whyte noted that a traveler flying from Los Angeles to San Bernardino "can see a legion of bulldozers gnawing into the last remaining tract of green between the two cities." On a flight over northern New Jersey, he said, the traveler "has a fleeting illusion of green space, but most of it has already been bought up and outlying supermarkets and drive-in theaters are omens of what is to come."

These concerns led to studies during the Eisenhower Administration of new government structures and policies that could help improve local planning and coordination. Many study recommendations were enacted under the Kennedy Administration as part of the Housing Act of 1961 which provided grants for mass transit and open space preservation and expanded funding and incentives for metropolitan transportation planning.

A further, and historic, step in addressing the problems of rapid suburbanization came with the enactment of the Highway Act of 1962. It made federal highway aid to areas with populations over 50,000 contingent on the "establishment of a continuing and comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by state and local communities." This required planning process, known as "three-C" planning for its continuing, comprehensive and cooperative features established the basis for metropolitan transportation planning used to the present day.

While regional cooperation and comprehensiveness had been long-sought goals of the planning community, the Act's requirement for continuous planning recognized that in a rapidly changing and increasingly complicated environment, which included dramatic population growth resulting from the post-war baby boom, regional plans had to be dynamic documents, subject to revision based on continuing data collection and feedback. Advancements in computer technology and social science research techniques became important tools for conducting this continuous planning.

Three-C in Practice

In the year following the adoption of the 1962 Act, governments throughout the country scrambled to put in place the required three-C process. The response of officials in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region was typical of major urban regions. Since the late 1950's, the non-profit Regional Plan Association, with input from many of the area's officials, had been developing a comprehensive plan for meeting the region's infrastructure needs. As a result of the 1962 Act, a new official body, the Tri-State Regional Planning Committee (later the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission), was created to build upon this planning effort and administer the region's three-C transportation planning process. A number of similar metropolitan planning bodies were created across the country and some existing voluntary and quasi-official regional bodies gained official status.

Despite the high initial expectations created among many planners by the new organizations and the enlightened nature of the three-C requirements, the weaknesses of the Act became clear in subsequent years. Implementation of the Act was the responsibility of the federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) which was closely allied with state highway departments and organizations dedicated to roadway construction. According to urban planning professor Thomas A. Morehouse, the three-C planning requirement was seen by these highway interests as "a potentially disruptive innovative force, threatening established policies, procedures, commitments and systems of decision-making." Of particular concern to highway interests was the possibility that local officials acting through new regional organizations — with mandates for comprehensive planning in hand — could block or slow construction of segments of the interstate system which were then were being pushed through densely populated metropolitan areas.

To avert the threat, BPR interpreted the Act in ways that preserved the authority of state highway departments. For instance, states were able to fulfill the "cooperative planning" requirement by negotiating agreements directly with local governments, bypassing though it was now tempered by somewhat greater local participation and informed by increasingly sophisticated technical studies. These agreements typically allowed local officials to participate in technical studies, initiated and dominated by state highway departments, for planning the implementation of specific roadway projects or for establishing long-range regionwide capital plans. Land use, mass transit and social issues were usually given only passing consideration.

One result of BPR's "artful" interpretation of the required three-C process was that regional planning agencies were left largely as adjuncts to state highway departments which relied upon them for collecting and interpreting data and perhaps for input on how road construction within their regions should proceed. In effect, the 1950s "build it now" approach to project development lived on in the 1960s, though it was now tempered by somewhat greater local participation and informed by increasingly sophisticated technical studies.


1960s Progress

While many of the hopes of the early 1960s were never fully realized, the cause of improved regional planning was by no means vanquished. With crucial support by President Johnson and his political allies, major transportation and housing legislation during the decade progressively expanded the role and authority of regional planning agencies (see box, right). In his message to Congress shortly after his election, Johnson noted that in confronting housing, transportation or other urban problems, metropolitan planning was needed to "teach us to think on a scale as large as the problem itself and act to prepare for the future as well as repair the past."

In addition to new responsibilities in the areas of environmental and transit planning, regional bodies were entrusted with reviewing all applications for federal aid to insure they were consistent with areawide plans and were coordinated with other federal-aid projects.

Though carefully crafted to preserve the prerogatives of business and avoid the taint of "big government," these legislative requirements were a significant step towards comprehensive regional planning. Their enactment reflected an often grudging recognition among politicians that the nation could simply not afford to build major projects that would transform its landscape and communities without attention to the consequences that, more often than not, played out on a regional scale. This recognition sprang, on the one hand, from increasing sophistication in social and environmental sciences that brought to light the damage done by unthinking policies of the past and that offered important new tools and methodologies for planning the future. On the other hand, mass movements and urban riots showed that narrow, technical approaches to problems could neglect critical social factors, with potentially devastating results.

The greatest impact of the legislative mandates was felt in the nation's largest metropolitan areas where regional agencies like the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission in New York and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in Philadelphia took on multiple official functions in cooperation with states and local governments. However, across the country, the bulk of staff resources, engineering expertise and political influence needed to see plans through to implementation continued to reside in state bureaucracies.

Particularly in many smaller urban areas, regional agencies found themselves going through the motions in fulfilling federal requirements while key decisions on transportation and other policies were made in state capitals.

Chapter 3 Toward More Balanced Transportation Through MPOs: 1969-1983

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, America built highways on a grand scale. With billions of dollars from federal gasoline taxes, each year 2,000 miles or more of elaborately-engineered interstate highways were dynamited through mountains, lifted over rivers, snaked across the countryside and bulldozed through denselypopulated urban areas. The highway building effort commanded wide public support and was backed by a powerful coalition of politicians, business leaders and interest groups.

Yet by the early 1970s the highway juggernaut was in serious trouble. Facing often fierce opposition in urban neighborhoods, concerns about the environment, funding shortfalls and other complications, highway projects were slowed, scaled-back and even blocked in many locations. Congressional hearing rooms became the scene of heated debate over efforts to broaden federal policy to embrace other transportation goals-such as supporting mass transit systems and ridesharing programs-that would reduce the nation's dependence on automobiles for mobility.

To help the nation cope with the vastly more complex transportation policy environment in the 1970s, Congress required each urbanized area to establish a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) composed largely of local officials. Congress hoped MPOs would help build regional agreement on transportation investments that would better balance highway, mass transit and other needs and lead to more cost-effective solutions to transportation problems.

As this chapter recounts, MPOs generally failed to live up to expectations during their first decade. Eventually, they faced cutbacks in funding and support for their missions, though formal federal requirements for transportation planning through MPOs continued...