Urban Transportation

Key urban issues, such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and the economic health of various neighborhoods, are significantly affected by decisions on how federal transportation funds are spent. These decisions, in turn, result from the transportation planning effort undertaken by 339 metropolitan planning organizations (MPO) in the United States. MPOs are not discrete decision-making groups with real jurisdictional powers but could be viewed as a consortium of government, transit agencies, and citizen groups, that join together for cooperative transportation planning. GAO reviewed the metropolitan transportation planning requirements of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 and the challenges that MPOs face in carrying them out. This report (1) discusses the experiences of MPOs in meeting the act's requirements and (2) examines the extent to which the Transportation Department's certification process ensures that MPOs in large cities comply with the act's planning requirements.

GAO found that: (1) the MPOs have found three of ISTEA's planning requirements particularly challenging to meet: (a) requiring greater involvement by citizens; (b) limiting short- and long-term transportation plans to reasonable revenue projections (the financial constraint requirement); and (c) selecting transportation projects; (2) the MPOs found that the requirement to involve citizens had ensured that their transportation plans better reflected their regions' transportation needs; (3) the financial constraint requirement led the MPOs to obtain more reliable revenue projections from the state departments of transportation and transit agencies and to exclude those projects that could not be financed within budget constraints; (4) ISTEA's project selection authority required the MPOs to become consensus builders, effectively working with the states, localities, and transit agencies in identifying projects; (5) in some cases, the efforts of the MPOs and the local officials to assume greater authority have encountered resistance from the states; (6) despite the difficulties encountered, the MPOs that GAO interviewed said that their efforts to meet these three planning requirements had improved their transportation plans; (7) the 13 MPOs that GAO interviewed unanimously endorsed the continuation of the ISTEA planning requirements; (8) in contrast, state department of transportation officials that GAO interviewed did not uniformly support the continuation of ISTEA's planning requirements; (9) as of January 1996, the Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) had reviewed 55 MPOs; (10) 23 were certified without qualification, and 31 were certified subject to certain corrective actions being taken; (11) the certification of one MPO was held in abeyance because of significant areas of noncompliance; (12) in reviewing 55 certification reports, GAO found that the reports are of limited usefulness in assessing trends or problem areas in the ISTEA planning process; (13) the certification reports vary widely in format and content because the Department did not develop standard criteria for assessing or reporting the MPOs' compliance; and (14) three MPOs were conditionally certified despite significant deficiencies in their urban transportation planning processes.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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