Lawmakers are girding for a big 2003 debate about the next of the multibillion-dollar federal transportation funding laws that subsidize roads and transit construction across the country. This will be TEA-3--the third four-year Transportation Energy and Efficiency Act since 1991. Already, hot points for debate are emerging: How many tens of billions will be authorized? Which states will be net gainers, and which net "donors'' through the taxes their citizens pay? How many pork-barrel roads--a perennial topic of muckraking reporters--will Congress mandate?
But we'll be lucky if Congress gives serious debate to an even more critical point: Where should principal decision-making power over 21st century transportation dollars be lodged--in state governments, or at the metropolitan level?
Through the interstate highway building era, states (through their highway departments) got all the federal money and authority. The states' control began to weaken a little in 1991. That's when the first TEA bill mandated that metropolitan planning organizations--MPOs--should be created at the regional level and that they should decide how to allocate scarce dollars among highway, transit and other transportation measures.
The 1991 and 1997 TEA bills also leveled the playing field among transportation modes, making most state and local projects, whether highways or public transit, eligible for 80 percent federal support. Those bills also set aside some money for transportation enhancements such as regional greenways and bikeways.
But the states still control a lot. Only 6 percent of the billions appropriated yearly is specifically targeted for MPOs. Only California, among all the states, has taken a big percent (75 percent) of its capital transportation program and allocated it to MPOs.
Most MPOs, given more dollars, "flex'' a lot of the money at their disposal to public transit--77 percent in the case of the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.
Most state transportation departments, by contrast, remain overwhelmingly wedded to the "same old'' of roads, roads, roads--even when it becomes clear, as voters in many states indicated this November, that more asphalt and concrete aren't necessarily the answer to traffic congestion, and sometimes just make it worse.
Even where federal law permits it, states rarely transfer funds to public transit or bother to send all available funds to regions to deal with their severe air quality problems.
The bottom line is that state transportation departments lack either the mind-set or experience to deal with the truly serious new transportation issues facing metropolitan America.
The challenges start with severe traffic congestion problems, detracting from Americans' quality of life and sapping billions of dollars from our economy. Virtually all congestion occurs in the metro areas where about 80 percent of us now live.
But regions face many more challenges: coping with often alarming levels of air pollution and resulting health problems; relieving road demand through urban parks, bikeways and greenways; dramatically increasing public rail and bus service; assuring equity among rich and poor communities, and a focus on pedestrian safety; linking transportation with affordable housing, school locations and smart land use; building intermodal links among roads, rail, airports and seaports.
All of these current-day problems cry out for regional attention--not delegation to sometimes distant, often disinterested state bureaucracies.
TEA-3 should lodge much more authority in regions, diminishing the state role, claim leaders of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the reform coalition that's pressed for alternative transit modes and localization in every bill debate since 1991.
The idea of more power to the regions may be a tough sell with George W. Bush, a former governor, in the White House and Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a state champion, taking over the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from Vermont's Jim Jeffords.
Still, MPOs have big promise for our transportation future. The challenge is to address their shortcomings. One problem is that their boundaries often don't coincide with metro regions--Charlotte, N.C., for example has four MPOs.
Also, MPO members--overwhelmingly local officials--often get ensnarled in log-rolling and fail to think creatively. And MPOs often perform badly on the "transparency'' front--revealing to the public details on the massive but complex road-building and transit initiatives they do control.
Solutions can be found. A single line in federal law could (and should) require MPOs be conterminous with census-defined metro areas. Federal and state law could encourage adding major stakeholders to MPO boards--business leaders, transit agencies and transit riders, transit unions, railroad and airport officials, civic and neighborhood groups.
And MPOs should be required to serve the public with dramatically improved Internet sites that track their choices and decisions.
By strengthening and reforming MPOs, Congress could undergird grass-roots accountability--even while encouraging innovation in the transportation sector we know will determine so much of our economy and quality of life in this century.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
(c) 2002, The Washington Post Writers Group
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