This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Regional planning (i.e. a whole metro area collectively planning its future, instead of delegating it to balkanized cities, states, and counties) is hot these days. The Brookings Institution is all over it.

Eric at the Prosperity Blog says that we in the Puget Sound have got a good regional plan, we just need to make more people aware of it:

Rather than trying to bring everyone together to develop a new collaborative vision, let’s use the vision that was already developed collaboratively and get everyone to buy-in. And I’m not talking your standard outreach: a couple of powerpoint presentations, a luncheon, maybe an op-ed. I’m talking a full frontal assault on the region’s citizens and the state legislature. Billboards, radio and television ads, a Facebook page, Twitter, Linked-in, social media, viral video, newspapers, speeches, rallies.

That’s a good idea, as far as it goes. Certainly if the local bigwigs don’t even know about VISION 2040 (and Eric says that many don’t) it’s definitely worth telling them about it! But it seems to me that the problem is more fundamental: one of authority. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are necessarily weak, because they aren’t directly elected and don’t have a large funding base. No politician’s career rests directly on the successful implementation of a regional plan, and so it’s never going to be top-of-mind.

This isn’t a knock on the PSRC, it’s just how government works in the US: overlapping jurisdictions with everything ultimately punted to the local level in the least efficient manner possible. Solutions to this problem are almost invariably framed as “we should put the PSRC on steroids,” i.e., give it some skin in the game by making it directly elected and in control of a sizeable budget.

While that may be a good idea (if far-fetched), it’s important to remember that, as metro areas go, Seattle actually has fewer overlapping municipalities than most. Seattle and a good chunk of its suburbs are entirely contained within a single county, and all 4 counties that make up PSRC’s domain are within a single state.* There are plenty of metro areas (mostly back east, but even Portland, OR to a degree) that cross multiple state lines, and encompass 10 or more counties. Seattle regional planning should be a walk in the park by comparison.

* And even Kitsap County is sort of an outlier, no?

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