Category: mega-regions

Megaregions: Next big thing? Or just nutty?

Alan Ehrenhalt, respected editor of Governing magazine, has weighed in on the issue of “megaregions,” wherein he questions this decades-old theory that metro regions (e.g. CharLanta( need to be treated as one entity. Hence the term, CharLanta.

I don’t intend to be on a Richard Florida kick (See my posting about “The Ruse of the Creative Class”) but Ehrenhalt does quote Florida as hopping on the au courant megaregions trend. But he goes on to note that transportation is one area in which planning regionally, or more to the point, megaregionally, makes sense.

Megaregionally? Charlotte can’t even come up with transportation planning that recognizes that Cabarrus, Iredell and York counties have anything to do with traffic in Mecklenburg! As a certain editorial writer on the Observer’s editorial board who is also a blogger opined Jan. 3 (you folks in the Charlotte region probably slept late and missed this):

Plan Transportation Regionally

It sounds like a bizarre camaraderie of dwarfs: MUMPO, GUAMPO, CRMPO, GHMPO and RFATS (in the Disney version he’d be the chubby, clumsy one). Let us not forget LNRPO and RRRPO (the small but snarling pirate dwarf?).
As if the names aren’t funny enough, here’s a thigh-slapper: All seven are transportation planning agencies for greater Charlotte.
Even if you toss out GHMPO (Greater Hickory Metropolitan Planning Organization) you still have an insane number of separate agencies ostensibly planning transportation in one metro region. And if you don’t think transportation planning in Rock Hill-Fort Mill (RFATS) and LNRPO (Lake Norman Rural Planning Organization) doesn’t affect transportation throughout the greater Charlotte region, well, you haven’t traveled on Interstate 77.
Ask most planners and they’ll tell you – off the record of course, so as not to tick off politicians – that sane transportation planning is mere fantasy until all six or seven MPOs and RPOs merge into one true metropolitan planning organization.
MPOs are federally mandated to plan “regionally.” Indeed, Title 23 of the U.S. Code says an MPO should cover a whole metro area. However, smaller cities such as Gastonia or Concord have little interest in joining with the Mecklenburg behemoth, fearing their share of state and federal transportation money would shrink.
If the region’s governments won’t do the right thing, the state should force it. At least two men in Raleigh get it. N.C. Department of Transportation Secretary Gene Conti is savvy about transportation policy, politics and about true regional planning. So is Sen. Dan Clodfelter, a Charlotte Democrat whose seniority and smarts have given him significant clout in Raleigh.
And both states must figure out how an MPO can cross state lines, so York County, S.C., can join the region’s transportation planning. Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., all have multi-state MPOs. It can’t be rocket science.

To read all six of the editorial board’s Agenda 2010 items, visit this link.

Bigger than Charlotte, bigger than Atlanta …

Megaregions.

If you haven’t heard the term before, you’ll be hearing it more. I wrote about the idea briefly last March. (Link is here.)

Yesterday and today a group of mayors – including Charlotte’s Pat McCrory and Atlanta’s Shirley Franklin – plus academics, business executives and others from the Char-Lanta corridor gathered to talk about whether this giant region should start looking at itself as one connected whole, rather than disconnected municipalities and states. Not surprisingly, they agreed to keep talking.

Mega-region is a somewhat new term for the idea that U.S. metro areas are clumped in larger multi-state regions, each operating in many ways as one economic entity, and that addressing environmental, transportation and economic issues requires looking beyond municipal and state boundaries. The so-called Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion stretches from Birmingham to Raleigh (I-20 and I-85 are key connecting threads) and, they say, should be viewed as one large urban region.

Mayors at this meeting were McCrory, Franklin, Jennie Stultz of Gastonia and Robert Reichert of Macon.

Several action items emerged from the meetings (journalists were not allowed in to cover the discussion sessions):

1. The mayors agreed to short-term lobbying to press Washington for money for high-speed rail through the corridor as well as money to replace the Yadkin River bridge on I-85.

2. They’ll meet again in October, probably in Greenville-Spartanburg.

3. They’ll launch scenario planning to try to glimpse what the megaregion would look like with or without a large-scale regional vision.

4. They’ll look to UNC Charlotte, Clemson and Georgia Tech to help develop an organizational structure to keep the group intact.

Look for more coverage from the Observer’s Bruce Henderson, but here are a few quick tidbits from a noon press conference today:

– The day’s best quote came from Catherine Ross of Georgia Tech’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development and author of “Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness.” Ross was one of the architects of the event. “My grandma said, ‘You have to put it on the ground where the chickens can get it.’ ” In other words, it’s a complicated concept and to help people understand it you have to put it out for them so they can start to learn it.

– Mayor Robert Reichert of Macon declared with enthusiasm: “You’re catching a glimpse of the future.” He noted, however, that “if you think Atlanta and Charlotte are gonna have a lovefest and not compete from now on … ” well, he said, that won’t happen. But cooperation and competition can co-exist.

Several times, the mayors said that in their view, mayors are better positioned than governors to work together on such urban issues. In an interview Tuesday, Georgia Tech’s Harry West said, “Georgia’s governor right now is like a one-armed paper hanger.” In other words, busy with multiple priorities.

Interested in learning more? Here are some links:
– Georgia Tech’s Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development’s megaregions research page.
-Urban Land Magazine’s “Think Global, Act Megaregional” (July 2006) by William Hudnut.
– “Think Locally, Act Regionally” from the Brookings Institution.

McCrory’s next project?

I hate to interrupt the great comment thread going on at “Developers bend city official’s ear” but here goes:

Hizzoner Pat McCrory stopped by the paper today to talk about what he plans to do with his remaining eight months in office. Headlines: Economic development [recruit more companies to bring more jobs], city spending [try to cut what needs to be cut in the city budget], public safety [he’s against crime and supports the police chief]. Motherhood and apple pie were probably on the list too.

But near the end of the conversation he talked about having recently gone to Atlanta for an event sponsored by Georgia Tech, to look at mega-regions. There’s a lot of theorizing going on among people who study city and metro region growth that county and state lines are all but irrelevant if you look at how economies work. It’s essentially the “Citistates” theory of folks such as Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson. Now folks are talking about mega-regions. One mega-region, dubbed “CharLanta,” is the urbanized crescent running from Atlanta through Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C., Charlotte, the N.C. Triad and on to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle area.

McCrory said he and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin agreed to try to get a project going, possibly with Georgia Tech and UNC Charlotte, to look at “the bigger picture vision thing.”

Now I’ve not always agreed with McCrory, but in transportation, he’s usually on target or pretty darn close, in terms of what’s needed. And he’s right about the need to look long-term and big picture.

One major need in the CharLanta corridor: Better passenger rail service. A significant attribute that sets apart the DC-to-Boston corridor is its clearly superior rail service. The whole Southeast region ought to get together and make the world’s best pitch, to anyone in D.C. who will listen, that it’s our turn for some of those rail dollars. After all, North Carolina got shafted in the federal transit-stimulus-divvying formula.

I don’t know how McCrory plans to spend his time post-mayorship, but working to put a mega-region coalition together might well be a project in need of a champion.