Gian-Claudia Sciara

Planning for Unplanned Pork: The Consequences of Congressional Earmarking for Regional Transportation Planning

Congressional earmarks can fund projects irrespective of carefully crafted metropolitan plans, potentially undermining years of analysis and negotiation. Yet, while earmarking of federal transport funds expanded significantly around the turn of the century, the planning literature has not considered whether or how this affected regionally scaled planning. To address that gap, this study examines how congressional earmarking and metropolitan planning interact, especially as competing paths for transportation investments. By analyzing transportation spending bills, other archival materials and conducting original interviews with federal, state and local agencies, transport policy organizations, and lobbyists, this article uncovers several unforeseen planning, financial, and administrative challenges associated with congressional earmarks. Second, it reveals how metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) manage such earmarks post hoc, creatively improving earmarking outcomes and strengthening planning in the process. These findings underscore the pivotal role of federal policies that institutionalize regional planning and that can enable flexible and assertive MPO responses. To successfully shape congressional intervention in regional investment programs and outcomes, planners and officials involved in metropolitan transportation must be sharply attuned to the politics of earmarking in addition to being exceptionally knowledgeable about the formal and informal rules that govern regional planning. With this dual awareness, of politics and process, they stand to more effectively influence congressional actions, enhancing their planning functions even when subject to uncertainty and conflict.

Metropolitan Transportation Planning: Lessons From the Past, Institutions for the Future

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There are more than 400 U.S. metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) overseeing multiple transportation projects totaling billions of dollars, yet these crucial organizations and their history and current role are generally unknown or confusing to many planning practitioners and scholars. MPOs face major challenges in developing meaningful long-range regional transportation plans, challenges rooted in their history that planners should understand as they grapple with metropolitan planning efforts. MPOs may approve projects and their funding, but disparate agencies and often competitive local governments control budgets and actually build projects. MPOs, moreover, do not fully represent all regional interests and have no control over the local land use decisions that would support less autocentric communities and human-powered modes. I provide a metareview of the history of regional transportation planning and the MPOs responsible for it, describing U.S. metropolitan transportation planning from the early 20th century. Federal legislation in the 1960s first suggested a regional forum for conversations about metropolitan transportation. Federal legislation in subsequent decades made incremental if incomplete progress toward creating a meaningful regional forum, adapting institutions and practices to increase stakeholder involvement as well as the scope of transport planning, yet MPOs have multiple limitations that planners can address. Takeaway for practice: History suggests that MPOs can be a force for regional change. Planners and policymakers could anchor future reforms to MPOs’ existing legal and administrative frameworks. Planners should revisit the membership and voting structures of MPO boards to ensure better stakeholder representation and permit some MPOs to generate and direct transportation funds at the local level.

The Impacts of Big Box Retail on Downtown: A Case Study of Target in Davis (CA)

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Big box stores have proliferated across the United States in the last three decades. Proponents have praised them for providing affordability and convenience to consumers, but opponents have criticized them for driving out local businesses, among other negative impacts for communities. We examine the impact of a big box store on a traditional downtown for the case of Davis (CA), which amended its zoning code to allow a Target store that opened at the periphery of the city in 2009. We use a before-and-after survey to determine where residents shopped for selected items before the store opened and after, evaluating which businesses were most affected. The results show that the new big box store had a limited impact on downtown businesses but substantial impact on stores located elsewhere within Davis and especially beyond city limits. Takeaway for practice: The Davis case suggests that the impacts of big box stores are not always what opponents anticipate. Other cities may lack some of the natural advantages that helped downtown Davis survive the opening of a big box store, but our results suggest that deliberate efforts to protect and enliven the downtown area mattered, too. Planners who want to fortify their own downtowns from the potential harms of big box stores could focus on enhancing downtown vitality by supporting a wide variety of activities and promoting the experiential aspects of shopping downtown. Such strategies would also put downtowns in a better position for surviving the rapidly evolving terrain of retail industry in the 21st century.