As the Sept. 30 expiration of the federal surface transportation law known as "SAFETEA-LU" approaches, the report asserts, "more complete information on the effectiveness of MPOs' transportation planning activities is needed, especially in light of government and industry associations' proposals for increasing or modifying MPOs' authority, responsibilities, and funding."

GAO, which surveyed all 381 of the legally designated MPOs as part of its research leading up to this report, found that those organizations vary greatly when it comes to capacity and functions. Some MPOs have only one or two staff members, for example, while others have more than 100 employees. In addition, half of the nation's MPOs serve populations of 200,000 or less while other MPOs represent millions of people. There is also no one-size-fits-all formula for where each MPO is headquartered; some of those organizations can be found in a regional planning council, others are housed within a government agency at the county or municipal level of government, while still others operate as independent agencies.

Most MPOs receive the bulk of their planning funds from the federal government, but as the report notes, those organizations also receive funds from sources at the state and local levels.

Another area of wide divergence among MPOs involves their respective technical capacities. These differences, according to the report, can be seen in the types of models used to develop travel demand forecasts and the manpower available to perform such work. In some cases, MPOs have taken on responsibilities, such as project implementation, that go beyond federal requirements.

The biggest challenges that confront MPOs, according to the report, relate to funding, staffing, authority, and technical capacity. Approximately 85 percent of the MPOs surveyed, for example, cited the lack of adequate funding as an impediment to more-effective transportation planning. In addition, about half of the MPOs said that the lack of flexibility in how federal money is used inhibits them from conducting more comprehensive transportation planning efforts.

As the report also makes clear, the MPOs' ability to conduct transportation planning is further hindered by such personnel challenges as limited staff and the lack of trained employees. Some MPOs also fall short when it comes to the technical capacity and data needed for complex transportation modeling.

"MPOs today face a much broader and more complex set of requirements and needs in their travel modeling than they had in the 1960s and 1970s, when the primary concern was evaluating highway and transit system capacity expansions," states the report. "New requirements -- such as determining motor-vehicle emissions and changes in land use -- have created additional data needs to account for the increasing complexity of the transportation system."

Another challenge pinpointed in the report involves the joint oversight of MPOs by the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration. As the report explains, the process-oriented approach of this federal oversight makes it difficult to gauge its effectiveness in improving transportation planning. The report also makes clear that the MPOs surveyed place greater value on the informal assistance provided by both federal and state governments.

The report suggests that Congress make MPO transportation planning more performance-based. This could be done, according to the report, by identifying specific outcomes for transportation planning and charging the federal government with assessing MPOs' progress in the achievement of those outcomes in the certification review process.

Finally, the report summarizes other proposals developed by government and industry to address the resource, authority, and technical challenges confronting MPOs. These proposals include:

• Allowing the application of transportation planning funds toward more activities that meet the needs of certain metropolitan areas;
• Better addressing the various capacity and planning needs of MPOs by making changes to planning requirements and authority or revising the legal definition of MPOs; and
• Expanding federal investment in modeling and data gathering in order to improve MPOs' technical capability and across-the-board reliability for travel demand forecasting.

The 40-page report, "Metropolitan Planning Organizations: Options Exist to Enhance Transportation Planning Capacity and Federal Oversight," is available at tinyurl.com/GAO-MPO.