Across the US, hundreds of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) help make transportation planning decisions. MPOs’ most important role arguably is determining how to distribute federal transportation dollars, with some increasingly planning for associated housing investments.
Under federal law, MPOs are directed to prioritize transportation investments within the metro area, which can include cities, towns, and counties. As such, federal law requires MPO boards to consist of local elected officials, transportation agency officials, state officials, and their appointees.
But which officials serve on these boards and how their votes are weighted varies across the US. Most MPOs’ bylaws were established by state and local officials when they were first created, and MPO staff generally have little power to change the bylaws today.
Who serves on these boards and whether their vote counts matter. MPOs have a wide spectrum of options when it comes to the types of transportation projects they can prioritize in their region, from highway expansion to public transit to cycling infrastructure.
To understand if MPOs evenly represent the populations they serve, we analyzed the membership of MPO boards for the largest US metro areas. We find that though boards prioritize the inclusion of local government representatives, their voting structures often don’t represent local populations proportionally. In some metro areas, some residents’ votes can be worth 10 times as much as other residents’. To better represent all residents, federal policymakers could encourage or require states to amend their MPO bylaws.
MPO boards in the 20 largest US metropolitan areas are primarily made up of local officials
We examined the bylaws of the MPOs representing the 20 largest US metropolitan areas to evaluate the composition of their boards. In each case, we wanted to know who sat on MPO boards and how votes were allocated across different agencies or local governments. We confirmed this information via email with staff from 16 of the MPOs.
First, we compared voting board membership in terms of whether members represent local areas, state transportation agencies, other transportation agencies, or other groups. Among the MPOs we examined, representatives of local governments (i.e., those representing an individual town or city) or districts were more than 50 percent of all board members, suggesting broad consensus among MPO board bylaws that boards should represent localities in their decisionmaking.
Some MPOs, such as those for the Boston and Chicago regions, do include substantial representation from transportation agencies; roughly a quarter of board members. Even for MPOs without a large share of transportation agency representatives, state departments of transportation often play an outsize role because they collect most transportation dollars directly.
Many MPO boards use voting systems that do not represent residents within a metropolitan area equally
The focus on local government decisionmaking, however, doesn’t mean each part of a metropolitan area is evenly represented on an MPO board.
For the 10 largest metropolitan areas, we compared the representation on MPO boards with the regional population distribution. To do so, we identified the share of the overall board vote representing the central cities and compared them with the central cities’ population shares relative to the regional population. In this comparison, we did not include the votes of state officials.
In regions like Dallas and Los Angeles, the central city holds roughly proportional voting power compared with its share of the population. The city of Los Angeles holds 16 seats of the 81 held by local officials regionwide. That’s very similar in proportion to the city’s 21 percent regional population share. This results from the Southern California Association of Government’s choice to use district-based board membership, meaning each member represents a district with a similarly sized population.
This is not the case in regions like Houston and Philadelphia, where the central city is underrepresented proportionate to its population. The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission’s board provides just 1 of 12 local voting seats to the city of Philadelphia, despite Philadelphia residents accounting for more than one-quarter of the regional population.
These voting systems can result in dramatic representation differences between parts of a metropolitan area. In the Houston region, Harris County and localities within it have just 1.9 votes on the MPO board per million inhabitants, compared with suburban Galveston County, which has 16.6 votes per million.
In 2023, recognizing the degree to which their city was underrepresented by the regional board, Houston residents voted to support Proposition B, which would require the city to leave the MPO unless the MPO’s board voting structure were adjusted to proportionally reflect the region’s population. The MPO, however, overwhelmingly opposed the change. The city council conceded, later choosing to remain a paying member of the board.
Though this variation in representation typically prioritizes suburban areas, this isn’t always the case. In the Bay Area, San Francisco’s representatives receive 3.7 votes on the MPO board per million inhabitants—compared with 1.8 for suburban Contra Costa County.
How some MPOs have developed voting systems that reflect populations more proportionally
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act required that new or redesignated MPOs “shall consider the equitable and proportional representation of the population of the metropolitan planning area” on their boards, but this requirement did not apply to existing MPOs—meaning almost all of them.
Some MPOs, like Los Angeles, have created board voting systems that represent their residents proportionally, but these systems vary. In the Portland, Oregon, region, the Metro board president is elected regionally, and six councilors are elected to represent equivalent-population districts throughout the region.
Other MPOs have developed weighted voting systems, with about 13 percent of all MPOs using them, according to a recent survey (PDF). This ensures that, when votes are taken, the board’s members hold voting power roughly based on the number of people they represent.
In the Seattle region, the Puget Sound Regional Council board votes using a proportional system. Each board member’s individual vote is weighted based on the population of the city, town, or county they represent. (In other cases, proportional voting can be requested by individual members after a nonproportional vote occurs, but MPO staff noted these requests rarely occur.)
These kinds of population-representative voting systems could help other MPOs better reflect all residents’ needs, rather than prioritizing the needs or perspectives of some.
Achieving such proportionality may be difficult because of metropolitan jurisdictional fragmentation and the overlapping boundaries of local governments. But the current system underrepresents many residents’ perspectives, often to the detriment of effective transportation options. By taking steps to encourage proportional representation in MPO bylaws, the federal government can support more accessible transportation options that support all residents’ needs.
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