AbstractsTransportation

In recent decades, many Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) – federally mandated transportation planning agencies in urban areas with populations of 50,000 or more – have become active sustainability planners, integrating their regional transportation plans with land use strategies, and addressing wider impacts upon the regional economy, social equity, and natural environment. MPOs have taken up this stance to address mandated responsibilities that have widened over time, such as for addressing air quality problems and incorporating public and stakeholder input, and as a re-interpretation of their main traditional responsibility, namely to manage transport mobility within regions. Facing a tightening vise of environmental and fiscal constraints, these MPOs have focused on improving accessibility, rather than mobility, through coordinated transport-land use strategies to improve “location efficiency,” for example, through promoting infill, mixed-use development located near transit stations. Because this approach requires closer coordination of land use and transportation planning than traditionally pursued, these MPOs have become more activist agencies in working with local governments and their land use policymaking authority. Their work provides a basis for slow but steady advancement of a new sustainability paradigm for transport policy.MPOs, however, face a severe disjuncture between the forces compelling them to advance sustainability goals, on the one hand, and institutional barriers that severely inhibit their ability to accomplish them, on the other. Long-standing governing arrangements in the US federal system sever authority over the elements of growth management that many MPOs now seek to integrate more fully. Constituted mainly as voluntary associations of local governments, MPOs lack independent authority; they control few resources autonomously, and provide instead a coordinating role for long-range transportation investment planning.In spite of the obstacles, some MPOs are experimenting with institutional innovations to integrate transportation and land use planning more effectively, providing a major contribution to sustainability policymaking, which depends on developing new and effective modes of governance for public goods management across all sectors of the economy, including for transportation and land use. Thus, MPOs are at the center of both opportunities and obstacles for advancing sustainable planning practices in the US. This dissertation evaluates how conflicting dynamics of path dependent institutional arrangements for growth management affect sustainability planning by MPOs. It provides a historical institutionalist account of the evolving role and planning strategies of MPOs since their inception in the 1970s, considering why and how some MPOs have begun to address sustainability concerns, and the opportunities and obstacles they face. It theorizes MPO planning practices in connection to concepts from the sustainability planning literature(s), in order to identify characteristics…