This oped responds Lon Anderson’s “Reform Washington’s dysfunctional Transportation Planning Board,” published in The WashingtonExaminer April 2.
As a member of the Transportation Planning Board (TPB) for the last decade, I have a certain sympathy with Lon Anderson’s characterization of our region’s metropolitan planning organization as “dysfunctional” – though the problem with TPB is not what Mr. Anderson thinks it is, but the opposite.
Unlike its counterparts in other areas of the country, TPB is not the locus of transportation decision making in the Washington region. For those who believe that it would actually be a good idea to “to force metropolitan areas to examine major transportation decisions and planning at a regional level, thus requiring all of the regional players to be involved,” this is the real problem.
In questioning why Montgomery County should have a say on a project in Northern Virginia, or Fairfax City on one in Maryland, Mr. Anderson is really objecting to the very concept of regional planning.
The answer, of course, is that major changes to transportation infrastructure in one part of the region have major impacts throughout the region. It makes no sense to treat them in isolation.
Anderson describes TPB as some kind of transportation graveyard, “where projects can be strangled, or at least debated to death.” It just isn’t so. While in principal TPB could act to hold up funding, in practice TPB almost never presents any kind of obstacle to advancement of whatever projects are put forward by the state transportation departments.
In the apt description once given by Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, TPB acts more as “the Big Stapler,” clipping together the submissions from the three states with little more than perfunctory review.
Anderson complains that TPB is controlled by “parochial” interests – by which he seems to mean locally elected officials. Since it is largely at the local government level that land use policy is made, connecting land use and transportation decisions could be seen as a strength of TPB.
But that’s not how it works. Notwithstanding the Byzantine voting structure that TPB operates under, all you really need to know is that local representatives have little influence at TPB, by comparison to folks in Richmond and Annapolis.
Control of decision making at TPB is largely held by the state highway departments. (Note that transit agencies, by contrast, have no vote at all.) They, of course, do not want their projects subject to scrutiny by regional officials, or assessed for compatibility with land use plans, and, despite the apparent power under federal statute, they have been effective in ensuring that TPB doesn’t exercise any real authority.
Of course, individual projects will occasionally become controversial, and may be slowed, or even stopped. But these battles are won or lost within each state, they are not fought out at TPB.
It’s hard to point to any major transportation decision in our region that was truly made at TPB. Issues like the ICC may be debated at TPB, but by the time they advance there the outcome is not in doubt.
For good or ill, TPB simply has not played the role that Anderson ascribes to it. Whether it’s highways or transit, what and how many projects get built is mostly a function of much money is provided by Congress and state legislatures. TPB has no role in that decision.
Nonetheless, the fundamental problem in our region isn’t that we don’t build enough projects fast enough, but that we have persistently failed to make rational, coordinated plans that connect land use policy with transportation infrastructure.
That might be different if TPB possessed, and exercised, the power that Anderson thinks it does.
Christopher Zimmerman, an Arlington County Board Member, serves on the Transportation Planning Board for the National Capital Region.
