Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) Board Structure Dataset

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPO) are federally required regional planning bodies that coordinate and approve transportation planning and billions of dollars of annual transportation spending in U.S. urbanized areas. There are over 400 MPOs across the U.S., each comprised of the counties and cities that make up their respective metro region. Each MPO is governed by an appointed board, most members of which are elected officials in the region’s member jurisdictions. State department of transportation and regional transportation agency officials may also sit at the MPO table.

Within the existing literature on regional transportation governance, the specific responsibilities, membership, and voting practices of regional bodies receive limited attention. We worked to develop the first complete inventory of governance attributes and modal representation for MPOs, paying particular attention to transit operator presence on MPO boards. We collected these data ourselves, to the greatest extent possible, for all 404 MPOs. To complement these MPO-specific data, we also consulted the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database to identify transit agencies operating within MPO planning areas.