Indeed, a 1994 study found that nearly 8 out of 10 center cities were underrepresented on the boards of their local MPOs in terms of voting power. That is, the voting strength of the center city was lower than the city’s percentage share of MPO area population.

Further, very few MPOs grant any type of voting power to non-geographic entities such as transit agencies, port authorities, or environmental agencies. As a result of these distortions, Martin Wachs and Jennifer Dill believe that:

“Transportation funds have almost always been more available from both state and federal sources for capital investments—new roads and transit lines—than for maintenance, repair, or system operations. Thus, we believe that the transportation system has been “overcapitalized.” More money has been spent on new facilities and equipment than would have been the case had monies been fungible between capital, operations, and maintenance applications.”

The main beneficiaries of new roads and transit lines have been suburbanites, who have higher average incomes than city dwellers, the main users—and fare-payers—on public transit systems.

IV. Prospects and Outlook for Regional Anti-Congestion Agencies

In almost every U.S. metropolitan area, attempts to carry out effective regional anticongestion tactics will be met with resistance. Any organizations created for this purpose could work well only if they exercised authority and powers now divided among many local and state government agencies, but most officials in those existing agencies strongly oppose any reduction in their present powers. Local governments are particularly loathe to yield any control over their land uses to outsiders. Indeed, the main function of many U.S. local governments is to control land-use patterns so as to benefit their existing homeowning residents by maintaining or increasing the market  values of local homes. Yet many tactics for reducing peak-hour congestion would require shifting at least some local power over land uses to a regional agency.

The Metropolitan Planning Organization structure has accomplished this goal to a great extent concerning the planning and construction of major infrastructure investments. But the authority of MPOs does not extend to operating those investments, or to controlling other types of anti-congestion policies, as noted earlier. Hence additional regional efforts are necessary to make use of all potentially effective anti-congestion tactics.

The most important actor in the potential development of effective regional agencies is the state.

State governments encompass entire metropolitan areas or large parts thereof; hence they should not exhibit the same narrow parochialism as local governments. In most metropolitan areas, the territory of regional agencies would lie entirely within a single state. And only state governments have the constitutional authority to create such regional agencies. Unfortunately, most state governments have been unwilling to create such regional agencies to combat traffic congestion. In fact, most states have not embraced federal transportation efforts and devolved sufficient powers and responsibilities to metropolitan areas.

One reason is that such an agency would have to be given powers that are now in part exercised by other state agencies—particularly state DOTs.

Officials in those other agencies would be unhappy about giving up any of their present powers. In addition, no state legislature is willing to incur the wrath of most local governments unless the legislators have strong incentives to do so.

State legislators are themselves elected from local districts. They are often linked personally and politically to existing local governments. Moreover,

since state representatives are seldom elected from districts large enough to encompass an entire metropolitan area, their viewpoints are also quite parochial.

At the same time, certain positive gains might motivate state legislators to establish regional anti-congestion agencies over the objections of local governments. The main gain would be in reducing traffic congestion in the long run, but that gain would be spread over residents and firms in all parts of the metropolitan area. For each beneficiary, it would be only a small part of the general benefits received from all state government actions. Hence few beneficiaries would decide how to vote among state legislative candidates on the basis of this issue alone.

In contrast, the potential loss of local sovereignty from the creation of such regional agencies would be seen by many local officials as a major threat to their welfare. So how each state legislator voted on this issue would heavily influence the amount of support he or she received at the next election from local officials. In the minds of most state legislators, the potential loss of support caused by their favoring creation of strong regional agencies would outweigh the gains from reducing traffic congestion.

This does not mean states will never create effective regional anti-congestion agencies, simply that such actions will be rare. Even when they occur, some resistance will persist within both state and local governments. Underlying that resistance is the fundamental belief among many citizens that reducing traffic congestion is far less important than pursuing other social or personal goals. Therefore, if reducing congestion means they must change behavior they have cherished for other reasons, they may prefer to endure congestion—while, of course, still complaining loudly about it.

What would cause the relevant public officials to adopt regional tactics in spite of the above drawbacks?

First, traffic congestion must become so widespread and so intolerable

that a large fraction of the metropolitan area’s citizenry regards it as a crisis.

Second, key state and local officials—especially the governor—must believe that carrying out regional anti-congestion tactics is essential to remedying this crisis.

Third, there must be some credible institutional structure available through which to accomplish those regional tactics.

These elements are discussed below.

The Need for a Crisis.
In a few metropolitan areas, peak-hour congestion is so bad that reducing it is widely perceived as the central issue facing local governments. Hence the governor and state legislators are strongly motivated to appear to be doing something about this problem in order to be reelected. Otherwise, they are unlikely to act effectively, since the political leaders in a democracy fear asking the citizenry to make fundamental changes in established institutions or behavior. People can be induced to do so without enormous resistance only if they believe they must to alleviate a crisis that is either already present or imminent. Elected officials are in turn unwilling to ask the public to make basic changes unless they believe the public thinks itself threatened by such a crisis.

Most such crises involve some sudden disruption of normal life. They must pose serious, obvious, and immediate threats to the welfare of a large percentage of the population. But peak-hour traffic congestion does not change dramatically overnight; rather, it gets a little worse each day. Since each commuter’s route differs from those traveled by most others, people do not all encounter the same degree of congestion simultaneously. So there is no widespread common perception concerning just how bad traffic congestion has become as of any particular date.

In 1999, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes was faced with such a crisis in the Atlanta metropolitan area. By the end of the 1990’s, only the Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan area drivers experienced more congestion each day than those in Atlanta.

Air pollution had become so severe that the region was faced with the loss of millions of dollars in federal transportation funds as mandated by the federal Clean Air Act. As a result, the 1999 governor’s race in Georgia was dominated by discussions of growth and transportation where Barnes made finding a metropolitan solution a cornerstone of his campaign. After his election, he created the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) and gave it broad authority to improve air quality, curb sprawl, and address traffic congestion by, among other things, giving it the ability to veto state and local transportation plans.

But generally, without any sudden crisis to galvanize public officials into action, they are reluctant to ask citizens to make the painful changes necessary to alleviate peak-hour congestion.  True, after congestion has become bad enough long enough, more and more citizens and their political leaders may decide it has passed some invisible threshold of acceptability. If enough citizens do, some elected officials will propose the kinds of actions described in this brief.

The Need for a Belief That Regional Remedies Are Essential.

Even when congestion reaches crisis stage in metropolitan areas, key officials must be convinced that strong regional agencies are essential to cutting traffic congestion. Otherwise they will prefer other remedies not requiring such drastic behavioral changes. The belief that regional remedies are essential is not widespread.

A critical function of public-private anti-congestion groups is to nurture and strengthen this belief in the minds of relevant public and private leaders. This is probably best approached by emphasizing the inadequacy of existing congestion-related policies formulated and carried out by highly fragmented local governments. Making this point will also require linking traffic congestion problems to the nature of land-uses and land-use decisions controlled by fragmented governments.

The general public needs to become more aware of the fact that traffic congestion is closely tied to the prevalence of low-density settlement patterns encouraged by local government land-use planning decisions—and by the public’s own settlement preferences.

The Need for Credible Regional Institutions.

 Even if the first two conditions exist, one or more credible institutional structures for implementing regional congestion remedies must also be available in the metropolitan area concerned. Possible forms of such structures were discussed above. This condition implies that all key segments of the metropolitan area must lie within a single state, because almost all regional bodies with effective action powers can only be created by state legislatures. If a metropolitan area is in two or more states, it will be extremely difficult to create any institutional structures able to carry out anti-congestion tactics throughout the region. Rivalries among political leaders and agencies in different states and the legal difficulties of creating interstate compacts will greatly complicate that task.

This condition also implies that both regional structures and the widespread belief that they are essential should be created before traffic congestion produces a crisis. Then when such a crisis appears, regional policy responses can be launched immediately. That will permit effective action to start before public concern with the crisis wanes. This is critical, because the public’s attention rarely remains focused on any one issue very long. Therefore, persons promoting effective anti-congestion tactics should start building a foundation for regional responses well before congestion reaches maximum intensity.

In the long run, severe peak-hour traffic congestion can only be effectively combated with the aid of at least some regional anti-congestion tactics. But it is extremely difficult to create the political support and institutional structures necessary for such tactics. To do so, proponents of these tactics will have to overcome massive resistance from local governments, existing state agencies, and a majority of citizens who do not want to stop commuting alone in their cars.

To accomplish this task they will have to act in advance of any widely perceived congestion crises. Achieving success also demands persisting—perhaps for many years—in spite of continual failure. After all, not one of the more than 340 metropolitan areas in the United States has yet adopted a comprehensive, regionally based strategy for attacking traffic congestion, insofar as I know. This does not mean that all efforts to achieve a regional approach should be abandoned as hopeless. But it does mean that persons attempting such efforts must be prepared to endure failure for a long time. Their motto must be, “Never give up!”

VI. Conclusion

Because traffic congestion is essentially a regional phenomenon, regional

approaches are necessary to coping with it as effectively as possible. Up to now in the United States, the complexity of such approaches, and their conflict with deeply-embedded attitudes favoring fragmented local governance over land uses, have both impeded effective anti-congestion policies. The time has come not only to reexamine these obstacles to effective action, but to overcome them by adopting truly regional policies dealing with key aspects of the many forces affecting traffic congestion.