If you live in a decent sized metropolitan area, your metropolitan planning organization forces local officials and other stakeholders to get together across political jurisdictions and make decisions about how to prioritize transportation projects in the context of a long term plan. The results then get sent up to the state, which uses it to allocate funding.

The article has a number of criticisms. MPOs have tended to favor highways over other forms of transportation, and these have often disrupted disadvantaged communities. They have tended to favor suburban areas. They have tended to favor new construction over maintenance of what is already constructed.

I have always thought MPOs are good even if they are imperfect because (1) they force stakeholders to work together at the right geographic and economic scale for infrastructure planning, (2) they force some kind of long term plan to be put down on paper, (3) they force the prioritization of site-level projects to be justified in the context of that long term plan, and (4) they bring in state and federal money to get projects in the ground based on the priorities of local actors that have “skin in the game”. In the absence of this process, either political jurisdictions would plan in isolation, or more efficient but less democratic structures would be created that largely cut out elected officials, voters and taxpayers. Engineers and officials not trained in planning would tend to jump right to analysis of site-level projects without a real plan. State and federal funding either would not happen at all or would be based on political lobbying. Corruption would likely be more common. And systems that are less in public view would tend to be neglected until major, obvious failures occur that affect peoples’ lives.

What I just described covers the state of water infrastructure in the U.S. pretty well. I think we should expand MPOs to cover other kinds of infrastructure rather than just transportation. MPOs are one of the reasons that politicians and the public think infrastructure=transportation and transportation=infrastructure. They do some rational planning and economic analysis at roughly the rate geographic scale and time period, then feed that into a messy political process to rank site-specific, short-term projects, then direct taxpayer money to projects that are likely to benefit the citizenry, while sharing the wealth at least a little bit. Unless you want to go authoritarian, it’s a reasonable approach to get infrastructure done in a democracy. I think it’s better and more equitable than the ratepayer-funded utility model followed in the water, energy, and communication industries.