Regionalism Redux: Exploring the Impact of Federal Grants on Mass Public Transit Governance and Political Capacity in Metropolitan Detroit

In: Urban affairs review, Volume 49, Issue 2, p. 220-253

Abstract

The policy actions of senior levels of government can often be important catalysts to collective action for metropolitan governance. This article compares the challenges that actors in metropolitan Detroit have faced in attempting to establish metropolitan transit governance in response to the promise of federal funding for regional transit in 1967 and the grants announced in the 2000s. How has the region responded differently to the challenge of regional transit in the most recent wave of funding? What accounts for governance failure even when, at various points in the historical debate, local actors have been in agreement on a metro transit agenda? What has changed since the 1960s and will these differences empower the metro region to finally establish metropolitan transit governance? Finally, what can the lessons of these two periods teach us about governing regional transit in fragmented political contexts?