A Blueprint for Unified Mass Transit

The Institute for Public Transportation has conceived a bold and imaginative plan to create the largest and most efficient mass transit system in the United States.

The proposed network of rails, buses and subways would take in the entire metropolitan region, where the largest concentration of people in the country lives, works and plays.

Some 20 million people would stand to benefit from the IPT blueprint for public transportation -- employees, employers, senior citizens, taxpayers, government and just about anybody who has to move about the metropolitan region of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

What IPT seeks to do is virtually the impossible: To make mass transit as easy and as quick to use as one's own personal, private car.

It's an ambitious, unprecedented task. Others have tried, and no one has yet put together a public transportation package for the entire tri-state metropolitan region.

Then what makes IPT's proposal more promising than the rest?

First, it has guts. Genuine political and social innovation. If the states of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are really serious about solving the manifold problems of transportation in the most congested region in America, then they'd better start now.

And not with nilly-willy gestures or expediently political lip-service, but with irrevocable convictions and commitments that lead to genuine reforms in our institutional and social system.

Until now, transportation has been generally viewed as a means to overcome the scattered growth pattern of sprawl development.

IPT wants the planners and politicians to see transportation as an integral part of housing, office, industrial and commercial development.

"To achieve our goals for a vital, healthy region," IPT director Dr. Robert N. Rickles says, "We must structure our present patchwork of regional, state, bi-state and tri-state transportation agencies into a single comprehensive planning body and a single operating authority dedicated to regional priorities."

Quite an order considering that New Jersey, New York and Connecticut have traditionally gone their separate ways in solving their own problems, as well as overlapping regional problems.

To accomplish this laudable goal, IPT suggests that the overall authority be vested in the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission. Tri-State would have the major respon- sibility for producing a detail- ed Master Plan for transportation, based on a long-range, land-use development pro- gram for the region.

In developing this plan, Tri- State would work with sub-re- gional planning units, com- munity groups and the transit operating agencies to encour- age maximum participation.

The operating agencies, however, would play a secondary role and would not have the final decision-making authority.

"This will end the present practices of transit authorities writing their own plans," Rickles asserts.

Most critically, Tri-State would be given the power of zoning review over all pro- posed developments of regional significance. The new plan- ning authority, as outlined in the proposal, also would be provided with "all other appropriate legal powers to permit its effective enforce- ment" of the Master Plan.

This would include the power to withhold federal funds for projects which do not comply with the Master Plan.

Finally, public hearings would be conducted in each sub-region to review the pro- posed transportation plans be- fore final approval of a program.

Perhaps the most dramatic element of IPT's "Institutional Reform of Regional Transpor- tation Agencies" is the vehicle through which this new man- date would be carried out.

IPT has recommended the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, primarily be- cause regional planners believe the P.A. is the only agen- cy of its kind capable of provi- ding comprehensive public transportation in the tri-state area.

Long a critic of Port Authority for its failure to im- prove public transportation, Dr. Rickles, former New York City commissioner of air resources, points to the authority's "successful rehabilitation" of the PATH railroad, as well as the authority's "rela- tively enlightened manage- ment" of that service.

IPT believes forming a partnership between Tri-State Regional Planning Commis- sion and Port Authority may be the answer to our transportation dilemma.

Certainly, Port Authority is equipped to execute a Tri- State Transportation Master Plan. But first both New York and New Jersey's governors and state legislatures must agree to such an approach, and Connecticut must then be included in the official Port District.

Although there are several apparent roadblocks standing in the way of IPT's tri-state transportation plan, all of them can be satisfactorily resolved.

The Port Authority itself is a creature of bi-state coopera- tion, starting out as the builder and keeper of a few bridges and tunnels.

Today, it's the largest gov- ernmental agency of its kind, building World Trade Centers and airports and managing the biggest shipping port in the world.

The IPT plan makes sense. It simply utilizes existing capabilities and planning expertise. Port Authority and Tri-State are both equipped to execute the most important transportation strategy in the nation.

Whether the State Adminis- trations and Legislatures of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut really want to look at the total metropolitan trans- portation problem, or continue to respond to piece-meal crises, remains to be seen.

Gov. Brendan T. Byrne and his state transportation com- missioner, Alan Sagner, al- ready have expressed a strong desire for the Port Authority to get involved in mass transit in the bi-state metropolitan region.

Commissioner Sagner now has a revolutionary transit plan to consider. If he accepts it, New Jersey could lead the way in establishing the most comprehensive, transportation grid in America. The tri-state plan also could become the model for other metropolitan regions through- out the country facing the same problem of moving a lot of people from one congested place to another.

The IPT plan would drastically reduce gasoline con- sumption, air pollution and urban highway congestion, while also saving money and time.

That should be enough reasons for state officials to take the IPT plan seriously.