Category: regional transportation planning

Revamp of transportation planning? (Or, toss the dwarfs?)

TRYON, N.C. – During council discussion about transportation, Mayor Anthony Foxx mentioned a key issue: Among the many challenges to finding federal funding for Charlotte-area transportation projects – streets, roads and mass transit alike – is that the feds are looking closely at how well a region is supporting regional transportation planning.

And the Charlotte region plans its transportation regionally about as well as I can dunk a basketball. Is there any other large metro region with more different “metropolitan planning organizations” – aka, the state-established way to plan transportation? Charlotte region transportation is split among 4 or 5 MPOs and two Rural Planning Organizations. Just one small example of the ridiculousity: The Lake Norman area is considered a Rural Planning Organization and not part of the Charlotte metro transportaton planning.

I’ve ranted about this previously. Small hope in the offing? At least the mayor and other transportation officials are talking about it. And MPOs must be reconstituted after every census. And NCDOT chief Gene Conti is actually paying attention to Charlotte. NCDOT now has a staffer with an office on the 8th floor of the Char-Meck Govt Center.

If you’d like to know a bit more about the unbelievable insanity of transportation planning in the greater Charlotte region, read this piece from early January – you have to go to the very end to read about what “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?).”

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.