Who actually decides?

On January 12, 1978, eleven of the fifteen members of the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission supported a regional housing plan, and the plan failed. All five Connecticut commissioners and all five from New Jersey voted yes. Four of the five New York commissioners abstained. Because the commission required a majority within each state’s delegation, one state’s silence outweighed two states’ agreement (the vote and its rule; Courier-News, January 16, 1978).

Nothing about the vote was secret or irregular; the rule worked exactly as written. The New York region has never lacked bodies responsible for thinking about it as a whole. What it has lacked is a body that holds, at once, the four powers that turn a regional idea into a plan, a train or a capital program: the authority to propose, the power to approve or block, control over financing, and responsibility for implementation. Its transportation history is largely a record of where those powers ended up, and what followed when they landed in different hands.

A district that could not be paid for

By the mid-1950s almost no one disputed the problem: private railroads were losing commuters and money. New York and New Jersey had merged their separate study commissions in 1954 to find a joint answer (pathway). In 1957 the answer took shape: a $400 million rail loop under the Hudson, run by a new public district, with an explicit bill attached. Reporting from a June 1957 meeting in Teaneck put the expected annual deficit at $12 million. Ten New Jersey counties would pay $8.13 million of it, Bergen alone $1.84 million, and New York City $3.87 million (Bergen Evening Record, June 4, 1957).

New York enacted the district in April 1958. Its findings conceded that transit could not be financed by fares alone, and the law would take effect only if New Jersey passed a matching one (Chapter 965, Laws of 1958). New Jersey’s Senate did; its Assembly did not. At public hearings the main objections were how the district’s 32 council members would be chosen and the bill’s failure to ban property taxes to cover deficits. A rewrite answered both. It created a ten-member board appointed by the governors, left deficits to the two legislatures, barred property taxes, and confined the district to planning rather than acquiring or running railroads. It still lacked the votes and died in committee on December 8, 1958 (The New York Times, December 8, 1958).

The one regional institution with money stayed out. When Robert Moses proposed in September 1957 that the Port Authority take over bi-state transit, its executive director, Austin Tobin, refused at once, citing the risk to the authority’s credit (Central New Jersey Home News, September 23, 1957; history of the commission). What emerged in 1959 was a two-member New York–New Jersey Transportation Agency with a planning role and none of the district’s operating or financing powers. The rewrite sought to make the proposed institution more politically acceptable by surrendering both its independent financing authority and its power to operate transit.

A plan that could pass and still not govern

The Tri-State bodies that followed asked for much less. The 1965 compact that New Jersey finally accepted was confined to planning and gave each governor a veto over the commission’s actions (essay). The broader commission formed in 1971 could study housing, land use and transportation across three states, but its board was built from state delegations. The power to block was distributed by state line.

The commission adopted the housing plan four weeks later, on February 9 (Newsday, February 10, 1978). But adoption gave it no authority over the suburban zoning codes the plan was meant to change. Those stayed with the towns. Nor did the commission control its own funding. In 1981 Connecticut’s legislature deleted the state’s $140,000 contribution during a budget squeeze, while the Reagan administration sought to end federal grants for comprehensive housing planning (The New York Times, May 17, 1981). The commission closed in 1982. Regional planning continued in narrower, state-based organizations (pathway).

A veto that started a negotiation

On the New York side of the region, the MTA brought together much of what the 1958 district was denied: it plans, borrows for and runs the subways, buses and commuter railroads. But its five-year capital programs also need the approval of a separate four-member review board representing the governor, the mayor of New York City, the State Senate and the Assembly, and that approval must be unanimous among the members entitled to vote (N.Y. Public Authorities Law §1269-b).

On December 21, 1999, the Senate’s member, Dean Skelos, vetoed the MTA’s proposed 2000–2004 program because the state had no comparable plan for highways (The New York Times, December 22, 1999; archived copy). By the end of December the Assembly’s member had vetoed it too (NYC Independent Budget Office, October 2000). The vetoes did not kill the program. They changed what it was attached to. In the spring budget agreement, the governor and the Legislature settled on five-year programs of $17.1 billion each for the MTA and the State Department of Transportation. Second Avenue subway funding rose from $700 million to $1.05 billion, mostly for design and engineering. The review board approved the MTA’s programs on May 4, 2000 (timeline; State of New York, 2004).

Approval did not settle who would pay. The program counted on $1.6 billion from a statewide transportation bond act, which voters rejected that November (State of New York, October 2001). Legislators who neither wrote the plan nor ran the trains had used a veto to tie the region’s transit budget to the state’s road budget. The record documents that linkage and its price. Whatever else motivated it lies beyond what the sources establish.

A veto over the planners

The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority is the federally designated planning organization for northern New Jersey. In 2000 its board had fifteen local elected officials and five members tied to the state, among them the governor’s representative and the state transportation commissioner (NJTPA, 2000). Federal rules already make the governor a co-approver of its list of federally funded projects (23 CFR 450.326). NJTPA’s own bylaws go further. Certified minutes of every meeting go to the governor, and “the vote on any resolution may be vetoed and canceled by the Governor” within ten business days (NJTPA By-Laws, Art. VIII, §10).

That is a different instrument from the review board’s. It does not withhold approval of a proposal; it can cancel a decision the board has already made. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign reported in 1999 that Governor Christine Todd Whitman used or threatened this power against the authority’s planning budget (Mobilizing the Region, July 16, 1999). The authority’s own publications from that year do not mention it, and the board minutes that would show what happened have not been located. The current bylaws establish the governor’s power to cancel a board resolution during the review period. What remains uncertain is precisely how that authority was exercised, or threatened, in 1999.

A train without a merger

One of the clearest examples of operational coordination required no new institution. From September 20, 2009, to January 1, 2017, a football-day train ran from the New Haven Line through Penn Station to Secaucus. Amtrak controlled the track and dispatching through Penn. NJ TRANSIT supplied the equipment and the crews west of the station, and Metro-North leased the trains and operated them to the east. Two written agreements, from 2008 and 2009, divided the work (essay; pathway). Over eight seasons the train carried about 29,000 passenger trips across 82 games.

It worked, and its limits show why. The train ran in spare Sunday slots that dispatchers could override. Each railroad kept its own fares, and the trip to the stadium still required a change at Secaucus. Average 2009 fare revenue per game covered about a third of the equipment rental alone, and the full public cost was never totaled. The service never had a permanent right to its schedule, a budget of its own, or anyone obliged to keep it going (essay). The records do not say why it ended. Voluntary agreements could divide operating authority cleanly. They could not create anyone responsible for the service as a whole.

What the cases reveal

These are five different mechanisms: a conditional interstate statute, a voting rule by state delegation, a statutory unanimity requirement, a gubernatorial veto over minutes, and contracts between railroads. Their differences matter. A veto over minutes cancels a decision already made. A review board withholds approval until the terms change. A delegation rule lets a minority stop a majority. A missing statute keeps an institution from existing at all. A contract permits cooperation without obligation.

What they share is narrower and sturdier. In none of them did the body given a regional responsibility hold all four powers by itself. Planning was granted most easily when it carried no power to tax or to carry out its own plans. Across these cases, financing repeatedly exposed the distance between an institution’s responsibilities and its ability to carry them out: the 1958 deficit shares and the property-tax question, Connecticut’s $140,000, a bond act voters rejected, a train whose fares never covered its equipment rental. The power to block, meanwhile, was spread widely, among state delegations, legislative chambers and governors. Those who held it could stop a regional decision without having to supply one of their own.

Coordination did happen: plans were adopted, a capital program was approved, a train crossed Penn Station for eight seasons. But it happened by negotiation among parties who each kept their own powers, which is why it was so often partial or temporary. The question for the region was never only whether its institutions could agree. It was who would be allowed to decide, and who would have to pay once they did.