Allocation and Goverance

Last night the Collective of Critical Transport Scholars kicked off another year of meetings with a discussion on Social and Environmental Justice Issues in Transportation. We were joined by Dr. Devajyoti Deka, Assistant Director for Research at Rutger University’s Voorhees Transportation Center. The conversation was guided by Dr. Deka’s 2004 chapter in The Geography of Urban Transportation (Hanson and Giuliano).

Many interesting comments were made during the evening session but of particular interest was our discussion on the appropriate focus and purpose of urban planning, as a profession and an area of research/expertise. What is the purpose of planning in U.S. cities and regions today? Being a critically oriented group, many people suggested planning (or urban policy related to the built environment) should focus on issues of equity (broadly defined). It was proposed that ‘Equity Issues’ were largely a consequence of resource allocation (by both public and private means), making distributional questions of paramount importance in transport policy and investment decisions. Even if cities have the tools to re-allocate in favor of equity (they don’t according to Petersen), how do they decide the patterns or priorities of redistribution? The answer would seem to lie in their Governance systems.

Governance is a key aspect of my dissertation research, as is financing. In my opinion you can’t look at one without looking at the other. Decision making process and structures (i.e. Governance) only matter if resources are available to implement or act on the decisions made. Follow the money (or the lack of it) and you will track the decision making process. Too often however, financing is juxtaposed to governance, as was on display at a panel discussion this morning on Regional Transit Governance.  Thomas Prendergast – CEO of Metropolitan Transit Authority –  stated that while we can identify cases of ‘bad governance’ it is impossible to stipulate an ideal governance model. On this point we agree – I think governance structures and lessons cannot easily be transplanted from one context to another, although we can certainly learn from the contextual experiences of others. But Prendergast went on to argue that in New York discussions about governance are a waste of time, the instead we should be focusing on getting more funding and creating accountability. Here is where Prendergast and I part ways.

For me, funding is fundamentally a governance issue. The problem is not that we lack the financial resources in society to accomplish a wide range of transport-related goals. As Buz Paaswell mentioned this morning, last year’s bonus payouts to Wall Street executives would be enough to fund the entire 2nd Ave Subway line. What we lack is the ability to harness resources for transport projects. The mechanisms for harnessing resources vary – from engaging the private sector in partnerships (P3) to collecting more revenue (higher taxes, fares) for the public sector – but the activation of these mechanisms are clearly related to governance. A call for more funding partnered with a desire to not discuss the systems by which it is obtained and distributed is simply a call for supporting the status quo. We need to stop looking at funding as a separate issues from governance and see them as two parts of a larger whole. Perhaps such a framework will help us move toward more sustainable models of transport provision.