Abstract
This dissertation studies an important type of regional organizations called Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). The primary function of these organizations is the programming, funding, and construction for the bulk of surface transportation projects in the United States. Since the introduction of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991, they are the primary conduit for billions of federal funds allocated for transportation. As a result, these largely autonomous organizations have an inordinate amount of influence on communities and the lives of the people they represent. However, due to their low salience with the public, and because their activities are wrapped up in complexity, they have largely gone unnoticed by the vast majority of the public. This dissertation models this important class of regional organization by the use of indices and parameters that are commonly used in the study of electoral systems to test the propensity of the MPOs to cooperation on a regional basis. It answers the question by first modeling the inputs, namely the electoral make up of the governing boards, and then by modeling the outputs in terms of the type of transportation projects, whether they solve a regional or a local transportation problem. This study takes a random sample of fifty MPOs and analyzes their most recent Transportation Improvement Program (TIP). These documents are published every three years and must list the funding commitments (either federal, state, or local) for each project and, in addition, they are subject to real fiscal constraints that necessitate in real tradeoffs between projects. This dissertation finds that most MPOs have historically high levels of disproportionality between seats and populations of constituting jurisdictions, and without much pressure or impetus for institutional change, this inhibits their ability to take a regional view. The high levels of disproportionality are primarily a result of a lack of regional seats and vastly varying sizes of the jurisdictions (usually cities and towns). The main finding is that the preference structures of the representatives (whether parochial or regional) predict whether projects have a local or regional focus. In summary, the MPOs ability to cooperate on a regional basis is hindered by their unbalanced governing boards which favor the one-territory one-vote notion of equality over the one-person one-vote criteria of equality.