Regional governance timeline

The association’s 1935 report said: “Motor vehicles cannot supplant rail facilities as a means of commuter transportation between New Jersey and Manhattan.” The North Jersey Transit Committee, formed the same year, backed a transit plan by consulting engineer L. Alfred Jenny of Dumont.

The New Jersey Legislature established the Regional Planning Commission, headed by Senator David Van Alstyne. Its work developed a regional approach to the metropolitan rail problem and preceded the separate New York and New Jersey rapid-transit commissions created in 1952.

After two years studying commuter transportation, the Regional Plan Association recommended a special interstate commission to examine the regional transportation system as a whole. President Paul Windels later presented that proposal as the basis for a fresh approach to rail investment and Manhattan congestion.

Senator David Van Alstyne introduced a metropolitan rapid-transit commission bill in New Jersey on February 11; Senator Greenberg of Brooklyn introduced its counterpart in New York on February 21. The Regional Plan Association endorsed the two bills on March 3, arguing that rail improvements were essential to relieving road congestion.

Hearings before the New York Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission, with New Jersey’s commission sitting in, renewed interest in seeing the region’s mass transportation needs whole. A subsequent New York Times editorial called the question of subsidizing commuter railroads the first to decide.

The Regional Plan Association recommended extending the BMT 14th Street–Canarsie line beneath the Hudson from its Eighth Avenue terminus to the western Jersey City meadows. The proposal would connect converging commuter railroads and parking areas with Manhattan’s north–south subways and direct service to Brooklyn.

Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. convened the Metropolitan Regional Conference, later known as the Metropolitan Regional Council. This voluntary association of the top elected officials of the counties and major cities of the tri-state region discussed shared problems such as regional traffic control and water and air pollution. New York City paid most of its $50,000-a-year cost.

Regional Plan Association vice president C. McKim Norton called on New Jersey, New York and federal regulators to maintain existing rail and connecting ferry facilities until the metropolitan transit study and commission recommendations were available. RPA argued that physical facilities and, wherever possible, current service levels should be retained during that work.

The Metropolitan Regional Conference accepted a committee report opposing a separate interstate air-pollution agency and favoring action through the conference. Members also backed an area-wide warning system for dangerous air pollution and approved a joint recreation-facility inventory with the Regional Plan Association, extending cooperation beyond the rail crisis.

A Regional Plan Association committee of eight headed by Columbia’s Wallace S. Sayre urged that the voluntary council be established by identical statutes in the three states and a compact approved by Congress, with a small full-time secretariat. “The present mass transportation crisis,” it said, “is but a foretaste of the difficulties which will soon and increasingly press upon the region.”

Governor Meyner and Highway Commissioner Dwight R. G. Palmer were cool to the Regional Plan Association’s proposal for a three-year study of metropolitan transportation. “There are so many agencies now, I would like to see some of them start producing before we hire any more,” Palmer said.

The association endorsed the Metropolitan Regional Council’s effort, through Mayor Wagner, to establish an agency representing the three states, New York City, and the council. It said the bi-state agency, “while in being is not yet in operation,” could be enlarged or replaced, and urged applying for federal highway planning funds for a comprehensive study.

At Senate hearings on Harrison Williams’s mass-transit bill, Regional Plan Association vice-president Walter Binger proposed a three-state agency to distribute federal capital loans and contract with railroads for service. He offered several institutional routes: a broader Port Authority, an expanded New York–New Jersey Transportation Agency, a federally chartered corporation, or a new interstate compact. The proposal connected federal aid to regional responsibility for how service would be provided.

The Regional Plan Association endorsed the Port Authority’s proposed H&M acquisition as an emergency measure while calling for eventual coordination by a three-state commuter agency. It urged studying through service and connections with New Jersey railroads and New York subways before buying equipment or investing heavily in the uptown tubes. RPA also opposed acquiring the Hudson Terminal office building solely as a profit-making real-estate investment.

The 1962 Highway Act required federally aided metropolitan highway projects to emerge from a continuing, comprehensive planning process carried out cooperatively by states and local communities. The cutoff for projects outside that process was July 1, 1965. Tri-State’s land-use and transportation work offered a way for the three-state region to qualify, making durable regional cooperation a condition of access to federal highway money.

Walter Binger told the Metropolitan Regional Council that preserving commuter rail would require about $800 million over ten years, largely from federal support. His proposed action agency would channel subsidies through service contracts and purchase standardized equipment in bulk. He said an expanded bi-state agency or Port Authority could perform the role alongside Tri-State’s planning work. Rockland officials pressed for restoring West Shore passenger service.

At the Regional Plan Association’s conference, a survey of 5,600 residents showed nearly two-thirds of those outside the city approving a metropolitan planning agency with limited enforcement powers. The Long Island Rail Road’s president complained that after three years “nothing has been done, but we’re still talking about the same things”; William J. Ronan, the Tri-State committee’s chairman, replied that “a great deal has been done.”

New York created the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority to take responsibility for the Long Island Rail Road and other commuter services. William J. Ronan, Governor Rockefeller’s secretary and chairman of the Tri-State committee, became its chairman. The authority purchased the LIRR from the Pennsylvania Railroad in early 1966, giving the state an operating body alongside the region’s planning commission.

In a 12-point memorandum the association recommended that the three states establish a public corporation to maintain, modernize, and consolidate all rail commuter service, with the states bearing current deficits. Its president said any faltering of New Jersey’s railroads “would have several times the effect” of the New Haven’s.

The Regional Plan Association began its Choices for ’76 television series, asking residents across the three-state region to vote on housing, transportation and other planning alternatives. The films linked land use with travel behavior and invited group discussion, with results intended for public officials as evidence of regional preferences.

Responding to a Regional Plan Association report criticizing its lack of public engagement, Tri-State voted to hold a fall conference on the region’s quality of life. New Jersey transportation commissioner Alan Sagner backed the initiative; the report urged the commission to explain major regional decisions, consult civic groups and turn staff research into public policy debate.

At a joint regional planning conference, Governor Hugh Carey and Mayor Abraham Beame called for a shared economic-development strategy instead of competition for businesses and tax revenue. Secretary of State Mario Cuomo added proposals for a regional transit tax, coordinated environmental policy and common financial standards, while New Jersey officials emphasized their state’s own economic programs.

The Regional Plan Association urged the governors and legislatures to expand Tri-State’s territory and responsibilities as Long Island sought greater autonomy. Its report proposed bringing Ocean, Hunterdon, Warren and Sussex counties into the planning area and adding public members to counter state-agency resistance to interstate coordination.

The council, the region’s only association of local governments, discontinued operation after losing its Tri-State funding. Its planning director wrote that “the voice of local government in this complex region of ours has been effectively silenced by governmental appointees.”

Connecticut’s withdrawal took effect and the commission, which for more than 20 years had been the conduit for about $3 billion in federal aid, was gone. The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council took its offices, serving New York City and five New York counties. “Without Tri-State there isn’t that kind of framework,” one planner said.

A New Jersey transportation panel proposed a high-speed commuter trolley line from a Meadowlands park-and-ride through a Weehawken tunnel and south along the waterfront to Hoboken, Exchange Place, and Jersey City, with a busway and limits on parking, at up to $850 million. The Regional Plan Association’s “River City” report called for a waterfront planning agency able to override local zoning.

As it prepared its third regional plan, RPA proposed a Regional Express Rail network connecting the commuter railroads through an improved Penn Station. The concept would allow journeys such as Stamford–Princeton and Tarrytown–Long Island without separate terminal trips, and RPA planners had begun discussions with the MTA, Port Authority and NJ Transit about the operating and institutional changes required.

The association’s 25-year plan called for folding the two agencies into a Regional Transportation Authority for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and for $25 billion in new rail lines. The Giuliani administration “expressed scant enthusiasm”; Port Authority executives said “melding them together will prove difficult.”

The planning department chose Carolyn Grossman Meagher to run a regional planning office announced by Mayor de Blasio in April 2015, at first a two-person office. “There’s sort of a history, over and over, of the region realizing it has shared problems,” she said, “and then lacking the capacity and sustained momentum to continue to work together.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation proposed requiring multiple metropolitan planning organizations in one region to merge or draft a unified plan. Since Tri-State’s end the New York region had splintered into as many as ten such organizations, none crossing a state line. Three associations of planning organizations asked that the proposal be withdrawn.

The Regional Plan Association released a three-phase rail vision linking services across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It called for Gateway and direct access for the Pascack Valley and Port Jervis lines, followed by revived West Shore passenger service and a Manhattan rail tunnel toward Brooklyn, with closer MTA–NJ Transit coordination rather than a merger of the three commuter railroads.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced plans to expand Penn Station south of its existing footprint while leaving Madison Square Garden in place. The proposal added tracks and tied the station project to large-scale surrounding redevelopment, setting off a debate over whether regional through-running and a redesigned existing station could deliver capacity with less demolition.