This is a study of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s (MTC) transportation decision making process after the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991. This innovative federal legislation promised to make transportation policy at...

After a 5-year study of transportation planning in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have concluded that the contentiousness we observed in the process was due in great part to differences in participants’ styles of planning and not solely to disagreements over desired outcomes. Each style...