Integrating transportation and land use at the metropolitan level in Toronto and Chicago: Perspectives of vertical and horizontal governance
This article focuses on the integration of transportation and land use planning at the metropolitan level in North America. Using semi-structured interviews and documentary sources, two large metropolitan areas, Toronto and Chicago, are compared in terms of their institutional evolution towards the goal of integrating regional transportation and land use planning. Public policies of different levels of government are documented, outlining the differences in responding to the challenges of planning integration in each city. In Toronto, a regional transportation agency controlled by the ministry of Transportation was created, and two pieces of legislation implementing a growth management strategy were adopted. In Chicago, a regional planning agency with the mandate of integrating transportation and land use planning was created, but its funding capacity and authority in terms of land use planning are limited, and thus more dependent on voluntary cooperation with the numerous local entities. These two different trajectories of reform indicate that the vertical dimension of governance constitutes an obligatory step on the path to the integration of transportation and land use planning at the regional level, and raise some questions around the impacts on transportation funding and land use decisions of the institutional design of new regional planning agencies.