Every morning, my local public radio station’s traffic report spans hundreds of square miles. And it is always grim, with serious back-ups and slowdowns (on I-66, I-270, I-495) by 6 am. So Washington DC and its environs have some interest in a regional transportation policy. Which ain’t exactly easy to come by. See the debate over extending Metro to Dulles, for example. What to do?
bq. Public policy decisions are increasingly made by regional governance efforts that involve diverse decision makers from multiple government units within a geographic region. These decision-making bodies face competing pressures to represent regional and local interests. We study how decision makers balance preferences for regionalism and localism within metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), the policymaking entities that are responsible for implementing U.S. federal surface transportation policy at the regional level.
That’s from a newly published paper by Elisabeth Gerber and Clark Gibson (gated; ungated). Gerber and Gibson describe the “underlying political dilemma associated with regional governance”:
bq. …org actors must give up public authority to achieve regional coordination.
So what’s the solution? Staff the metropolitan planning organization with people not beholden to local interests:
bq. Analyzing data from a sample of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, we find that MPOs dominated by elected officials produce more locally focused policies, holding other factors constant, while MPOs dominated by nonelected public managers produce more regionally oriented policies.
I can’t help but note that on the Metropolitan Washington Transportation Planning Board, elected officials outnumber non-elected officials by about 2-1. Would the local traffic report be a little sunnier if this ratio was reversed?