MTR recently met with the Capital District Transportation Commission (CDTC), the Capital District’s federally-designated Metropolitan Planning Organization, to hear about the agency’s 25-year regional transportation plan New Visions 2040, and how it will move forward despite facing fragmented and ineffective governance.

CDTC and other MPOs divide up their work into two broad categories: planning, which involves laying out and analyzing long-range plans for regional infrastructure development; and programming, which is the unsexy but vital coordination of funds and resources between various levels of government for projects and ongoing maintenance. New Visions comprises both aspects with its regional design and its allocation of federal and state funds.

The Threat of Ongoing Dysfunction

Executive Director Michael Franchini emphasizes that the uncertain future of infrastructure funding affects planning and programming efforts nationwide. This ongoing dysfunction has an impact at the local, state and federal levels, from the MTA capital plan to the federal-aid highway system. The lack of a reliable funding stream:

• threatens to waste time, money and resources invested in medium- and long-range planning
• provokes cut-throat competition between agencies for remaining funding
• cuts a project’s operating budget to its core functions (meaning many key maintenance and state-of-good-repair projects go unfunded)

In CDTC’s case, limited reliable funding endangers the excellent regional reputation for bicycle and pedestrian projects that the agency helped build. Further, as Franchini and CDTC Senior Transportation Planner Sandy Misiewicz explained, the New Visions plan must be light on specific projects to receive funding, lest CDTC misguidedly inflate the public’s hopes for certain improvements it cannot execute.

Planning in a Fragmented Region

CDTC is unique among New York State MPOs since it serves a region with four discrete urban centers. While Albany is the largest of the Capital Region’s four major cities, Schenectady, Troy and Saratoga Springs each bring distinct economic and social identities to the region. Meanwhile, regional government is fragmented by four counties, innumerable municipalities and other government units.

That level of fragmentation hinders potential regional thinking on planning issues. When asked about the possibility of regional cooperation for local transportation funding—along the lines of a dedicated sales tax levy, like Denver’s FasTracks or Los Angeles’s Measure R—Franchini sighed and said, “Albany’s not ready for that kind of thinking yet.” While the Cuomo administration emphasizes government consolidation, the reform initiative has gained little ground. In the Capital Region, CDTC seems assured that even a region-wide sales tax—a tactic that would require no additional bureaucracy—would be seen a threat to the status quo of maximal municipal control over funding and tax revenue sources.

But the Capital District functions as one coherent urban system. The above maps, taken from New Visions, show how the urbanized areas of the four counties merged together over the last 15 years, extending from south of Albany to 20 miles north of Saratoga Springs in Glen Falls (which, despite its close ties to the Capital District, has its own MPO because of county boundaries).

CDTC has been working to promote regional cooperation. Alongside the Capital District Transportation Authority and nearby municipalities, the agency helped create and strengthen the BusPlus system—a limited-stop service that will soon link Albany, Troy and Schenectady. CDTC also works with municipalities and other stakeholders to understand shared interests on local plans through its linkage program.

Progress is slow, and parochial attitudes seem to largely reign. But change cannot be imposed from above, so if the Capital Region is to remain competitive moving forward, its civic leaders will have to build a regional consensus to substitute for higher government leadership.