one area the purpose of assembling Federal transportation responsibilities under one roof was being realized. A somewhat similar situation existed in the Federal Aviation Administration.
With the growing cooperation evident at the Washington level, the Department of Transportation began extending the policy to the field. In 1970 a memorandum from the Federal Highway Administrator to the Secretary of Transportation recommended a program to be tried in three regions, which by then had been made coextensive for all Administrations, in developing the planning program. Under this experiment, approval of the planning program in any of the three areas, FHWA, UMTA, and FAA, would be approved by the regional modal administrator only when all three were correlated. Regional representatives of each Administration would meet to consider the programs advanced for approval by the State or local jurisdictions, and if necessary discuss them further with their counterparts, to assure that the individual programs were complementary and not overlapping. Hopefully a single planning agency, such as the one developed cooperatively to meet the requirements of the “3C” process, would carry on most if not all the transportation planning up to about project design stage (to use highway terms), with the Federal share of the cost apportioned appropriately among the three Administrations.
The trial program was to extend over a period of a year, but within months after its initiation the Secretary ordered it to be extended to all regions and made a permanent procedure. Thus at least in transportation planning, coordination was achieved on paper, and increasingly in practice. By 1973 the procedure had become known as the Unified Work Program and all planning under the agreement must be performed by a single planning agency. The policy established by Congress in 1962 applicable to the highway program had now, by decision of the executive branch, been made applicable to all modes.
In 40 years planning, not even called that in the beginning because of prejudice against the word, has advanced from highway improvement planning to broad, sophisticated transportation planning, advancing in its theory and techniques even more than the technology of any of the modes it plans. Unified at State and local level by requirements of the Congress and Federal executive departments and expanded in scope by acts of Congress as new demands appeared, it is a powerful tool in metropolitan planning, not only in transportation, but in general planning as well. Congress has forced the disparate transportation elements in metropolitan planning to come together at local level. It has provided for coordination of modal administrations within the executive branch.
But much remains to be done at the metropolitan level in planning transportation and land uses as interrelated elements if the overall plan is to be an accomplished fact. Local and metropolitan transportation policies can be based on sound planning, even though currently there is little assurance that adequate land use controls or transportation programs will necessarily ensure that transportation and land use, however carefully planned, will achieve or retain balance. States increasingly are coordinating transportation planning and programing through departments of transportation, but only a few are relating them to approved statewide land use or development plans or even policies. At the Federal level there is no national development plan or policy to which a transportation plan or policy can be related. Indeed, much remains to be done.
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