How can advocates across the country work together to advance seamless regional integration?

Transportation Camp participants voting on a wall session proposals with sticky dots. — Participants voting on and surveying the sessions to attend at Transportation Camp 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo courtesy of Transportation for America)

Two weeks ago, about thirty activists and transportation professionals from across the US came together to brainstorm a coordinated national strategy for federal advocacy to promote seamless regional integration efforts at Transportation Camp DC 2023. The occasion confirmed that regional integration is a topic of major interest across the country - and there are numerous opportunities for advocates in different regions to be working together to advance shared goals.

Transportation Camp is an ‘unconference’ that occurs each year ahead of the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting - a huge annual national conference for the transportation industry in Washington, DC. Unlike traditional conferences, an ‘unconference’ is a participant-oriented meeting where the attendees decide on the agenda democratically and self-facilitate session topics.

The session I submitted, “A National Strategy for Seamless Regional Integration” got enough votes to be included in the program, and participants who showed up represented a variety of regions, including Seattle, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Boston, Rhode Island, and others.

As the discussion got underway, it was clear that the group largely agreed about the importance of creating seamless, rider-first regional transit systems across the US that are simple for the user in order to attract far more riders. Participants confirmed that a variety of institutional models can deliver that outcome - ranging from decentralized structures with many operators like the German vehekehrsverbund model to, at the other extreme, full consolidation under one entity, like Transport for London.

Participants identified several key challenges preventing regions from attaining this vision, including:

Lack of fare integration & media
Territoriality and political divisions within metropolitan areas, often along urban/suburban lines
Lack of technical expertise and staff resources at public agencies to take on these complex issues
Learned helplessness - and hopelessness - among staff and advocates
Lack of shared accountability for transit outcomes within regions - resulting in unwillingness among individual transit agencies to take on the risk/liability of other transit agency’s failures. Specific examples of this included for customer service/complaints (‘not my problem, go talk to them’) and for promoting safety and security within systems.
“It’s nobody’s job” - in most regions, lack of a regional institution with mandate and authority to advance integration
Perverse incentives that promote competition, not cooperation
The fact that in many regions, different public agencies run transit from those who control streets

After brainstorming challenges, the discussion turned to identifying how federal policy affects these challenges, and what are the opportunities that could inform a shared agenda for advocates across the country.

Five key opportunity areas for federal policy change for advocates to collaborate on emerged from this discussion:

The need for a clear national transit vision and policy on seamless regional transit integration.
Several participants suggested that a clear, national vision for transit - and as part of that, a specific, high visibility policy promoting seamless integration - would be extremely helpful to regional initiatives. Clear federal policy could help turn endless, circuitous debates and studies about whether transit integration is worth the pain and cost, into questions of how to best accomplish integration. Many countries, such as Switzerland, have national policies - even constitutional language - specifying mobility as a basic right, and the expectation of minimum levels of service for areas above a certain population. At a national scale, the lack of a national base-level transit expectation leaves many regions with very little transit at all. To be most effective, a national transit vision should include clear outcomes and metrics for basic transit service levels associated with population levels and densities.
Advocacy for federal operating dollars - with strings attached.
One member of the group noted that a new ongoing source of federal operations funding could significantly support regional integration, especially if conditions were attached to new funding like fare and schedule integration, or identification of a network manager authority. Past efforts such as the one led by Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) in 2021 to create a new funding program for transit operations should be strongly supported by regional integration advocates.
Providing direct assistance to regions and establishing a federal ‘center of excellence’.
Several people discussed the valuable role that the federal government could play in helping regions improve transit by providing direct technical assistance to help regions build the expertise and capacity they need. Too often, the federal government provides grants for integration and innovation but regions lack the capacity and skills to make good use of grant resources. It was noted that large regions are much more capable of leading complex, expensive studies like fare or wayfinding integration studies due not only to a greater financial resources, but also greater staff capacity and expertise. By contrast, smaller or less well-resourced regions simply may not have the capacity to undertake a project as complex as regional integration. To address this, FTA could develop a specialized in-house team of consultants that could partner with regions, MPOs, and agencies to advance complex regional integration challenges that are consistent with federal policy goals for seamless integration - like developing a service-based vision, implementing data standards, transitioning to open payments, or fare and wayfinding integration. This division could take inspiration from how 18F, a specialized design consultancy within the General Services Administration, partners with federal agencies to improve user experience.
Adjusting incentives in federal grant programs
There was strong support for joint advocacy calling for incentives and eligible uses for federal grants to include regional integration policies. The group supported more efforts like the letter that Seamless Bay Area collaborated on with Rep. Quigley and Rep. DeSualnier, and signed by eighteen members of Congress, calling on FTA to support fare integration by making adjustments to grant programs.
MPO Reform
Finally, there were several ideas about how changes to federal laws around metropolitan planning organizations, MPOs, could help promote greater regional integration. MPOs exist as a result of federal law, which requires them to oversee the metropolitan planning process for all urbanized areas above 50,000 inhabitants (MTC is the designated MPO for the 9-county Bay Area). While federal law requires MPOs oversee metropolitan planning, it is more often the exception rather than the rule that MPOs actually are effective at promoting transit coordination. One challenge with MPOs is that they are not well-aligned with metropolitan areas - for example in Florida, most counties have created their own MPO, and metropolitan regions like the Tampa Bay Area have 3 different MPOs. Another problem is that across the country, MPOs have problematic governance structures that tend to underrepresent transit-friendly, urban areas, and overrepresent suburban areas. MPO boards tend to consist of members who are whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and tend to prioritize spending on highways and automobile infrastructure instead over transit.
Federal policy change that revisits MPO governance structure and mandates could be extremely helpful for regions across the county - and advocates should work together to prepare for the next opportunity to do so. Many believe the best opportunity to do so would be the next Surface Transportation ‘reauthorization’ bill, which we could reasonably expect to occur within the next 2-5 years.

In summary, there was a lot of interest in advancing seamless transit across the country and many opportunities for policy change at the federal level. Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion - and if you are reading this and want to discuss federal advocacy opportunities further, please reach out to me! I’m at ian@seamlessbayarea.com.