In northern California, three regional agencies representing some 11 million people are banding together to address long-term transportation planning issues. In the Northeast, a dozen states are collaborating on an effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. And in other places across the United States, from the Southwest to the Midwest, governments and organizations in large metropolitan areas are embracing regional strategies to address challenges that cross jurisdictional boundaries. 

It’s an approach that planners have been encouraging for some time, as adjacent U.S. metro areas seemed increasingly destined to merge. Jonathan Barnett remembers attending a conference in London in 2004, and watching as maps of expected urban growth and regional development in the United States flashed onto a screen. At the time, Barnett was the director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues had been pondering the implications of Census Bureau projections that the U.S. population might grow 50 percent or more by 2050, an increase of more than 100 million people. 

“What popped out at everybody in the room was that there was a pattern emerging in the maps of where these people were going to go,” Barnett says. “You can see [these urban patterns] from space, and it’s a little like looking at the stars and seeing Orion and Sagittarius. We realized that something important was happening.” 

Bob Yaro was in the room that day, too. “You could see that, across the country, the suburbs of one metropolitan region were merging with the suburbs of the next metropolitan region,” recalls Yaro, who led the Regional Plan Association at the time while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. “Physically, these places were becoming integrated with each other. And then when we looked at economic and demographic trends, you could see that in fact the lives of these cities and metropolitan areas were merging with their neighbors.” 

This was hardly the first time that geographers and planners had taken note of the way linked metropolitan areas can share economies, natural resource systems, infrastructure, history, and culture. But by the turn of the 21st century, the scope and pace of the phenomenon were reaching new levels in the United States.  

Not long after the conference in London, Armando Carbonell—who retired from the Lincoln Institute this year after leading its urban planning program for more than two decades—gave the phenomenon a name that would stick: megaregions. 

A band of planners, including Yaro, Barnett, and others, has picked up the banner of megaregions, arguing that these urban areas have an outsize importance nationally. “More than eight in 10 Americans live in these places, and it’s over 90 percent of the economy of the country,” Yaro says. “So it’s very clear that if these places don’t succeed or aren’t operating at their full potential, the whole country’s economy and livability will suffer.” 

This spring, the Lincoln Institute published Megaregions and America’s Future, which Yaro wrote with Ming Zhang, director of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, and Frederick Steiner, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. They argue that megaregions may offer a way for the United States to contend with challenges that don’t respect arbitrary political boundaries, from climate change to public health crises like COVID-19. Megaregions can, if properly and creatively governed, strengthen climate resilience, natural resource management, economic competitiveness, and equity at the local, regional, and national levels. 

What Constitutes a Megaregion 

For more than a century, the heavily populated region stretching from Boston to Washington, DC, has drawn the attention of geographers. In his 1915 book Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes gave the swath of urban development running from Boston to New York the decidedly unlovely term “conurbation.” In 1961, French geographer Jean Gottman called the region a “megalopolis.” And in 1967, Herman Kahn gave the whole corridor the equally unlovely name “BosWash.” 

It would take another three decades before these boundary-busting phenomena began receiving more comprehensive academic attention, but the pace has been picking up over the last 20 years as the University of Pennsylvania, the Lincoln Institute, and others have worked to advance people’s understanding of what megaregions are and how they function. 

Definitions vary of what, exactly, constitutes a megaregion, but they are generally defined as regional economies that clearly extend beyond an individual metropolitan area. “I think of megaregions as a way of thinking about space, more than as real things that are out there,” says Carbonell. “I see it as a construct and a tool, [but] megaregions are not fixed and they change.” 

Researchers have used a variety of innovative approaches to identify and delineate individual megaregions. One analysis looked at the commuting habits of more than 4.2 million Americans to identify megaregions. Another used satellite imagery to identify contiguously lighted urban agglomerations across the globe, then—with a sort of Seussian whimsy—gave those places names like So-Flo, Chi-Pitts, Char-Lanta, Tor-Buff-Chester, and Am-Brus-Twerp (Florida, Gulden, and Mellander 2008). To estimate economic activity in each megaregion, that study combined the satellite-imaged light footprints with population and GDP data, extrapolating a “Light-based Regional Product.” It also used the number of patent registrations and highly cited scientific authors in each megaregion as a measure of technological and scientific innovation. 

At this point, researchers have identified about 40 megaregions around the world (see sidebar). In Megaregions and America’s Future, the authors focus on 13 megaregions in the United States (see map). Those are the venerable Northeast; Piedmont Atlantic, a southern stretch that includes sections of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; Florida; Great Lakes; Gulf Coast; Central Plains; Texas Triangle; Front Range in Colorado; Basin and Range (Utah and Idaho); Cascadia (the Pacific Northwest from Portland to Vancouver, BC); Northern California; Southern California; and Arizona’s Sun Corridor (Yaro, Zhang, and Steiner 2022). 

Many of these megaregions have economies that put them within the rankings of the world’s biggest national economies. In 2018, for example, the Northeast megaregion had a GDP of $4.54 trillion—more than that of Germany. The same year, the nearly $1.8 trillion GDP of the Southern California megaregion was larger than that of Canada. In many ways, a megaregion is an increasingly spontaneous and organic unit of organization, one that presents more opportunity than the traditional political divisions that it transcends. 

Megaregions Around the Globe 

Scholars have identified more than 40 megaregions around the world, and several more are rapidly forming in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Established megaregions include: 

Pentagon, Europe. This region, whose outlines are defined by Paris, London, Hamburg, Munich, and Milan, was identified as an economic and transportation hub in 1999. It covers about 20 percent of the continent and is responsible for 60 percent of its economic output. Several other megaregion models have also been applied and explored in Europe. 

Tokaido, Japan. The corridor between Tokyo and Osaka is home to more than half of the country’s population. Its cities are linked by the Shinkansen high-speed rail network, which has reduced travel time between Tokyo and Osaka from eight hours in the early 20th century to two and a half hours today; a bullet train in development will further reduce the trip to one hour. 

Pearl River Delta, China. The most densely populated urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta includes Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. The Chinese government has invested several hundred billion dollars in high-speed rail designed to strengthen connections within and among the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, the region around Beijing and Tianjin, and burgeoning megaregions in coastal and inland areas. 

Collaborating on Climate Mitigation 

One of the most prominent examples of successful initiatives that span a megaregion is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cooperative effort to cap and reduce power sector carbon dioxide emissions in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Known in shorthand as “Reggie,” it is the first mandatory cap and trade program for greenhouse gas emissions in the country and now spans 12 states. 

At the turn of the 21st century, efforts to establish a national cap and trade framework for greenhouse gas emissions were fizzling. In 2003, then–New York Governor George Pataki sent a letter to the governors of other states in the Northeast proposing a bipartisan effort to fight climate change. In 2005, the initial agreement to implement RGGI was signed by the governors of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. In 2007, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland signed on. 

“I think for the states that recognized that climate change was real and a problem, there was a desire and an appetite to take some leadership,” says Bruce Ho, who heads the Natural Resource Defense Council’s work on RGGI. “Climate change is a global problem, and we need to be acting as much as possible in a coordinated way. But at the same time, there’s a recognition that you have to start somewhere.” 

Even as climate change efforts at the federal level foundered, RGGI got stronger and expanded. In 2014, the participating states reduced the emissions cap by 40 percent and committed to further year-by-year reductions. Then in 2017, the states agreed to aim for an even steeper decline in emissions, and also agreed to extend those emissions reductions efforts through at least 2030. 

Since RGGI began, power plant emissions have decreased by more than 50 percent—twice as much as the national decrease during the same time—and the program has raised over $4 billion by auctioning carbon allowances. That money has been invested in local energy efficiency programs, renewable energy, and other initiatives. Virginia, for example, dedicates half of its RGGI funding to low-income energy efficiency programs and puts the other half toward flood preparedness and sea-level rise mitigation in coastal communities. 

While not immune to criticism, RGGI is “an early example of a megaregion-scale initiative that has held up quite well,” says Carbonell—and it continues to gain momentum. Although then–Governor Chris Christie withdrew New Jersey from RGGI in 2012, the state rejoined in 2020. Virginia joined in 2021, and Pennsylvania followed this year. Leaders in North Carolina, spurred by a citizens’ rulemaking petition, are now considering joining RGGI as well. 

Hopes for High-Speed Rail 

One of the key challenges of megaregions is how people get around within them. Because megaregions can run 300 to 800 miles across, they demand an approach to transportation that has largely been ignored in the United States. “They’re too small to be efficiently traversed by air, and too large to be easily traversed by road,” Yaro says. “And then on top of that, the airports, airspace, and the interstate highway links in these places are highly congested.”  

Putting a new emphasis on high-speed rail, which can reach speeds over 200 miles per hour, will help relieve a transportation system that is groaning under strain nationwide, says Yaro, who is now president of the North Atlantic Rail Alliance, a group advocating a high-speed and high-performance “rail-enabled economic development strategy” for New York and New England. In addition to reducing congestion, highspeed rail can decrease emissions; it can also spur economic development by connecting people with jobs and other opportunities throughout a region. 

Plenty of successful examples of high-speed rail systems exist worldwide. In Japan, for example, the world’s first high-speed rail line—the famous Shinkansen, or bullet train—has linked Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka into a single megaregion. The system, which now carries over 420,000 passengers each weekday, will mark its 60th year of service in 2024. In Europe, nine countries now operate high-speed rail on more than 5,500 miles of track. Perhaps no country has embraced high-speed rail as enthusiastically as China. Since just 2008, its government has built a system that reaches practically every corner of the sprawling country on more than 23,500 miles of track—and counting. 

In the United States, an early realization of the concept’s potential has been slow to gain traction. In 1966, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island proposed a high-speed line between Boston and Washington in his book, Megalopolis Unbound: The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow. In 2000, Amtrak started Acela service between Boston and Washington. Because it reaches 150 miles per hour, it qualifies as high-speed rail—yet it hits that upper limit over only about 34 miles of the 457-mile route. The Acela’s average speed is just 70 miles per hour. 

Plans for intercity high-speed rail have been considered or are underway in other regions; the Texas Central Line would connect Dallas and Houston, while the Brightline West project would link Southern California to Las Vegas. Elsewhere in California, construction is underway on an ambitious line that will connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a second phase extending the line north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. But challenges related to funding, politics, and logistics have meant that high-speed rail has barely made it out of the blocks. 

Early versions of last year’s infrastructure bill included $10 billion for high-speed rail, but that was cut during negotiations. While proponents keep pushing for meaningful federal investment in a high-speed network, megaregions can also benefit from investments in existing systems—or “fast-enough rail,” as Barnett dubs it in his book Designing the Megaregion: “There are many transportation improvements that can be made incrementally to give a much better structure to the evolving megaregions.” 

Sharing Solutions in California 

The Northern California Megaregion extends across the cities of the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and the San Joaquin Valley. The region has seen a dramatic increase in commuters from inland communities like Tracy and Stockton to jobs in the Bay Area, and has some of the nation’s longest average commute times.  

James Corless heads the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, but previously worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the agency responsible for planning and financing regional transportation in the Bay Area. In the mid-2000s, he says, regional agencies began looking at the swath of cities running from the Bay Area to Sacramento as an emerging megaregion, and gave it a name that put it squarely in the ranks of places like So-Flo and Char-Lanta. “We actually coined the phrase ‘San Framento,’” Corless says. “Everybody hated it. But it got people’s attention.” 

In 2015, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Sacramento Area Council of Governments, and San Joaquin Council of Governments signed an MOU to create a Megaregion Working Group. Their goal: to begin tackling issues that transcended the boundaries of the 16 counties and 136 cities they collectively represented.  

It took a while for the effort to gain momentum, precisely because of the sprawling nature of the megaregion. “I kept seeing these megaregion meetings pop up on my calendar and then get canceled,” Corless says. “Because for elected officials to get together from across these 16 counties, it requires an entire day of travel.” 

The arrival of COVID, and the resulting turn toward conducting government business via Zoom, helped bridge that distance and give the effort momentum. “At first, we were struggling a little bit to find our focus,” Corless says. Gradually, though, the participating entities began asking a simple question: “Where are we stronger together?”  

Late in 2021, the Megaregion Working Group announced a list of a dozen transportation-focused projects, from highway improvements to expansion of three regional rail lines. The California high-speed rail system that’s under construction—but far from completion—doesn’t much play into the working group’s plans, Corless says. “I have no doubt that high-speed rail will be a game changer,” he says. But “if we could just get reliable medium-speed rail, we’ll take that.” 

In fact, much of the megaregional effort is more quotidian than flashy infrastructure projects. The partners are focusing on integrating their regional plans and synchronizing their long-range planning cycles. “Because so much of our travel and even our housing markets are now intertwined,” Corless says, “if we’re looking out at the next 25 years, we need to be in sync.” 

The concept of megaregions is coming of age, Corless says, in much the same way that the rise of metropolitan planning organizations helped meet new challenges in the 1960s. “Once American cities suburbanized,” he says, “you couldn’t rely on the central city to do everything. People were more mobile, economies were bigger, and the issues transcended local city and county boundaries.” 

Moving Megaregions Forward 

What will it take to push the megaregion concept—which essentially invites those metropolitan planning organizations to an even bigger table—more squarely into the public consciousness and the policy realm?  

Bob Yaro thinks one answer is the climate crisis, which could push regions to work together in new ways. “I think it takes a crisis to do anything big in this country,” Yaro says. “You read these stories about whole counties running out of water. And that’s only going to get worse. [To address] the climate issue, you need both adaptation and mitigation strategies, and those mitigation strategies probably become most efficacious at the megaregion scale.” 

The RGGI initiative in the Northeast offers one example of how that kind of collaboration can work; the current water crisis in the desert Southwest offers another. There, tough times have, somewhat paradoxically, made for closer connections. Communities and governments have looked toward their neighbors and realized that they can do more together. 

The seven U.S. states that rely on water from the Colorado River, along with Mexico, have historically had an extremely contentious relationship. Yet, while recent headlines scream about impending water catastrophe, those parties have for more than 20 years been quietly working together on agreements intended to minimize the collective damage that they might suffer. A sense of partnership, however tenuous and prone to ongoing tensions, has been supplanting longstanding parochial attitudes toward the river.  

As metro regions melt together and global challenges ramp up, a growing sense of shared fate with historically distant neighbors could help tackle all kinds of problems that might once have seemed insurmountable. 

“I think one of the things we need to do is redefine ‘home,’ and the Southwest is Exhibit A on why that needs to happen,” Yaro says. “I think it’s redefining home at this larger scale. The final boundaries are going to depend on an individual community’s sense of association with their neighbors—but the place doesn’t succeed unless we do that.” 

Matt Jenkins is a freelance writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications. 

Lead image: A rendering of the United States as seen from space, based on NASA images. Credit: DKosig via iStock.

In northern California, three regional agencies representing some 11 million people are banding together to address long-term transportation planning issues. In the Northeast, a dozen states are collaborating on an effort to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. And in other places across the United States, from the Southwest to the Midwest, governments and organizations in large metropolitan areas are using regional strategies to address challenges that cross jurisdictional boundaries. 

It’s an approach that planners have been encouraging for some time, as adjacent U.S. metro areas seemed increasingly destined to merge. Jonathan Barnett remembers attending a conference in London in 2004, and watching as maps of expected urban growth and regional development in the United States flashed onto a screen. At the time, Barnett was the director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues had been pondering the implications of Census Bureau projections that the U.S. population might grow 50 percent or more by 2050, an increase of more than 100 million people. 

“What popped out at everybody in the room was that there was a pattern emerging in the maps of where these people were going to go,” Barnett says. “You can see [these urban patterns] from space, and it’s a little like looking at the stars and seeing Orion and Sagittarius. We realized that something important was happening.” 

Bob Yaro was in the room that day, too. “You could see that, across the country, the suburbs of one metropolitan region were merging with the suburbs of the next metropolitan region,” recalls Yaro, who led the Regional Plan Association at the time while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. “Physically, these places were becoming integrated with each other. And then when we looked at economic and demographic trends, you could see that in fact the lives of these cities and metropolitan areas were merging with their neighbors.” 

This was hardly the first time that geographers and planners had taken note of the way linked metropolitan areas can share economies, natural resource systems, infrastructure, history, and culture. But by the turn of the 21st century, the scope and pace of the phenomenon were reaching new levels in the United States.  

Not long after the conference in London, Armando Carbonell—who retired from the Lincoln Institute this year after leading its urban planning program for more than two decades—gave the phenomenon a name that would stick: megaregions. 

A band of planners, including Yaro, Barnett, and others, has picked up the banner of megaregions, arguing that these urban areas have an outsize importance nationally. “More than eight in 10 Americans live in these places, and it’s over 90 percent of the economy of the country,” Yaro says. “So it’s very clear that if these places don’t succeed or aren’t operating at their full potential, the whole country’s economy and livability will suffer.” 

This spring, the Lincoln Institute published Megaregions and America’s Future, which Yaro wrote with Ming Zhang, director of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, and Frederick Steiner, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. They argue that megaregions may offer a way for the United States to contend with challenges that don’t respect arbitrary political boundaries, from climate change to public health crises like COVID-19. Megaregions can, if properly and creatively governed, strengthen climate resilience, natural resource management, economic competitiveness, and equity at the local, regional, and national levels. 

What Constitutes a Megaregion 

For more than a century, the heavily populated region stretching from Boston to Washington, DC, has drawn the attention of geographers. In his 1915 book Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes gave the swath of urban development running from Boston to New York the decidedly unlovely term “conurbation.” In 1961, French geographer Jean Gottman called the region a “megalopolis.” And in 1967, Herman Kahn gave the whole corridor the equally unlovely name “BosWash.” 

It would take another three decades before these boundary-busting phenomena began receiving more comprehensive academic attention, but the pace has been picking up over the last 20 years as the University of Pennsylvania, the Lincoln Institute, and others have worked to advance people’s understanding of what megaregions are and how they function. 

Definitions vary of what, exactly, constitutes a megaregion, but they are generally defined as regional economies that clearly extend beyond an individual metropolitan area. “I think of megaregions as a way of thinking about space, more than as real things that are out there,” says Carbonell. “I see it as a construct and a tool, [but] megaregions are not fixed and they change.” 

Researchers have used a variety of innovative approaches to identify and delineate individual megaregions. One analysis looked at the commuting habits of more than 4.2 million Americans to identify megaregions. Another used satellite imagery to identify contiguously lighted urban agglomerations across the globe, then—with a sort of Seussian whimsy—gave those places names like So-Flo, Chi-Pitts, Char-Lanta, Tor-Buff-Chester, and Am-Brus-Twerp (Florida, Gulden, and Mellander 2008). To estimate economic activity in each megaregion, that study combined the satellite-imaged light footprints with population and GDP data, extrapolating a “Light-based Regional Product.” It also used the number of patent registrations and highly cited scientific authors in each megaregion as a measure of technological and scientific innovation. 

At this point, researchers have identified about 40 megaregions around the world (see sidebar). In Megaregions and America’s Future, the authors focus on 13 megaregions in the United States (see map). Those are the venerable Northeast; Piedmont Atlantic, a southern stretch that includes sections of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and the Carolinas; Florida; Great Lakes; Gulf Coast; Central Plains; Texas Triangle; Front Range in Colorado; Basin and Range (Utah and Idaho); Cascadia (the Pacific Northwest from Portland to Vancouver, BC); Northern California; Southern California; and Arizona’s Sun Corridor (Yaro, Zhang, and Steiner 2022). 

Many of these megaregions have economies that put them within the rankings of the world’s biggest national economies. In 2018, for example, the Northeast megaregion had a GDP of $4.54 trillion—more than that of Germany. The same year, the nearly $1.8 trillion GDP of the Southern California megaregion was larger than that of Canada. In many ways, a megaregion is an increasingly spontaneous and organic unit of organization, one that presents more opportunity than the traditional political divisions that it transcends. 

Megaregions Around the Globe 

Scholars have identified more than 40 megaregions around the world, and several more are rapidly forming in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Established megaregions include: 

Pentagon, Europe. This region, whose outlines are defined by Paris, London, Hamburg, Munich, and Milan, was identified as an economic and transportation hub in 1999. It covers about 20 percent of the continent and is responsible for 60 percent of its economic output. Several other megaregion models have also been applied and explored in Europe. 

Tokaido, Japan. The corridor between Tokyo and Osaka is home to more than half of the country’s population. Its cities are linked by the Shinkansen high-speed rail network, which has reduced travel time between Tokyo and Osaka from eight hours in the early 20th century to two and a half hours today; a bullet train in development will further reduce the trip to one hour. 

Pearl River Delta, China. The most densely populated urban area in the world, the Pearl River Delta includes Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. The Chinese government has invested several hundred billion dollars in high-speed rail designed to strengthen connections within and among the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, the region around Beijing and Tianjin, and burgeoning megaregions in coastal and inland areas. 

Collaborating on Climate Mitigation 

One of the most prominent examples of successful initiatives that span a megaregion is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cooperative effort to cap and reduce power sector carbon dioxide emissions in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Known in shorthand as “Reggie,” it is the first mandatory cap and trade program for greenhouse gas emissions in the country and now spans 12 states. 

At the turn of the 21st century, efforts to establish a national cap and trade framework for greenhouse gas emissions were fizzling. In 2003, then–New York Governor George Pataki sent a letter to the governors of other states in the Northeast proposing a bipartisan effort to fight climate change. In 2005, the initial agreement to implement RGGI was signed by the governors of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont. In 2007, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland signed on. 

“I think for the states that recognized that climate change was real and a problem, there was a desire and an appetite to take some leadership,” says Bruce Ho, who heads the Natural Resource Defense Council’s work on RGGI. “Climate change is a global problem, and we need to be acting as much as possible in a coordinated way. But at the same time, there’s a recognition that you have to start somewhere.” 

Even as climate change efforts at the federal level foundered, RGGI got stronger and expanded. In 2014, the participating states reduced the emissions cap by 40 percent and committed to further year-by-year reductions. Then in 2017, the states agreed to aim for an even steeper decline in emissions, and also agreed to extend those emissions reductions efforts through at least 2030. 

Since RGGI began, power plant emissions have decreased by more than 50 percent—twice as much as the national decrease during the same time—and the program has raised over $4 billion by auctioning carbon allowances. That money has been invested in local energy efficiency programs, renewable energy, and other initiatives. Virginia, for example, dedicates half of its RGGI funding to low-income energy efficiency programs and puts the other half toward flood preparedness and sea-level rise mitigation in coastal communities. 

While not immune to criticism, RGGI is “an early example of a megaregion-scale initiative that has held up quite well,” says Carbonell—and it continues to gain momentum. Although then–Governor Chris Christie withdrew New Jersey from RGGI in 2012, the state rejoined in 2020. Virginia joined in 2021, and Pennsylvania followed this year. Leaders in North Carolina, spurred by a citizens’ rulemaking petition, are now considering joining RGGI as well. 

Hopes for High-Speed Rail 

One of the key challenges of megaregions is how people get around within them. Because megaregions can run 300 to 800 miles across, they demand an approach to transportation that has largely been ignored in the United States. “They’re too small to be efficiently traversed by air, and too large to be easily traversed by road,” Yaro says. “And then on top of that, the airports, airspace, and the interstate highway links in these places are highly congested.”  

Putting a new emphasis on high-speed rail, which can reach speeds over 200 miles per hour, will help relieve a transportation system that is groaning under strain nationwide, says Yaro, who is now president of the North Atlantic Rail Alliance, a group advocating a high-speed and high-performance “rail-enabled economic development strategy” for New York and New England. In addition to reducing congestion, highspeed rail can decrease emissions; it can also spur economic development by connecting people with jobs and other opportunities throughout a region. 

Plenty of successful examples of high-speed rail systems exist worldwide. In Japan, for example, the world’s first high-speed rail line—the famous Shinkansen, or bullet train—has linked Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka into a single megaregion. The system, which now carries over 420,000 passengers each weekday, will mark its 60th year of service in 2024. In Europe, nine countries now operate high-speed rail on more than 5,500 miles of track. Perhaps no country has embraced high-speed rail as enthusiastically as China. Since just 2008, its government has built a system that reaches practically every corner of the sprawling country on more than 23,500 miles of track—and counting. 

In the United States, an early realization of the concept’s potential has been slow to gain traction. In 1966, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island proposed a high-speed line between Boston and Washington in his book, Megalopolis Unbound: The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow. In 2000, Amtrak started Acela service between Boston and Washington. Because it reaches 150 miles per hour, it qualifies as high-speed rail—yet it hits that upper limit over only about 34 miles of the 457-mile route. The Acela’s average speed is just 70 miles per hour. 

Plans for intercity high-speed rail have been considered or are underway in other regions; the Texas Central Line would connect Dallas and Houston, while the Brightline West project would link Southern California to Las Vegas. Elsewhere in California, construction is underway on an ambitious line that will connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, with a second phase extending the line north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. But challenges related to funding, politics, and logistics have meant that high-speed rail has barely made it out of the blocks. 

Early versions of last year’s infrastructure bill included $10 billion for high-speed rail, but that was cut during negotiations. While proponents keep pushing for meaningful federal investment in a high-speed network, megaregions can also benefit from investments in existing systems—or “fast-enough rail,” as Barnett dubs it in his book Designing the Megaregion: “There are many transportation improvements that can be made incrementally to give a much better structure to the evolving megaregions.” 

Sharing Solutions in California 

The Northern California Megaregion extends across the cities of the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, and the San Joaquin Valley. The region has seen a dramatic increase in commuters from inland communities like Tracy and Stockton to jobs in the Bay Area, and has some of the nation’s longest average commute times.  

James Corless heads the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, but previously worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the agency responsible for planning and financing regional transportation in the Bay Area. In the mid-2000s, he says, regional agencies began looking at the swath of cities running from the Bay Area to Sacramento as an emerging megaregion, and gave it a name that put it squarely in the ranks of places like So-Flo and Char-Lanta. “We actually coined the phrase ‘San Framento,’” Corless says. “Everybody hated it. But it got people’s attention.” 

In 2015, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Sacramento Area Council of Governments, and San Joaquin Council of Governments signed an MOU to create a Megaregion Working Group. Their goal: to begin tackling issues that transcended the boundaries of the 16 counties and 136 cities they collectively represented.  

It took a while for the effort to gain momentum, precisely because of the sprawling nature of the megaregion. “I kept seeing these megaregion meetings pop up on my calendar and then get canceled,” Corless says. “Because for elected officials to get together from across these 16 counties, it requires an entire day of travel.” 

The arrival of COVID, and the resulting turn toward conducting government business via Zoom, helped bridge that distance and give the effort momentum. “At first, we were struggling a little bit to find our focus,” Corless says. Gradually, though, the participating entities began asking a simple question: “Where are we stronger together?”  

Late in 2021, the Megaregion Working Group announced a list of a dozen transportation-focused projects, from highway improvements to expansion of three regional rail lines. The California high-speed rail system that’s under construction—but far from completion—doesn’t much play into the working group’s plans, Corless says. “I have no doubt that high-speed rail will be a game changer,” he says. But “if we could just get reliable medium-speed rail, we’ll take that.” 

In fact, much of the megaregional effort is more quotidian than flashy infrastructure projects. The partners are focusing on integrating their regional plans and synchronizing their long-range planning cycles. “Because so much of our travel and even our housing markets are now intertwined,” Corless says, “if we’re looking out at the next 25 years, we need to be in sync.” 

The concept of megaregions is coming of age, Corless says, in much the same way that the rise of metropolitan planning organizations helped meet new challenges in the 1960s. “Once American cities suburbanized,” he says, “you couldn’t rely on the central city to do everything. People were more mobile, economies were bigger, and the issues transcended local city and county boundaries.” 

Moving Megaregions Forward 

What will it take to push the megaregion concept—which essentially invites those metropolitan planning organizations to an even bigger table—more squarely into the public consciousness and the policy realm?  

Bob Yaro thinks one answer is the climate crisis, which could push regions to work together in new ways. “I think it takes a crisis to do anything big in this country,” Yaro says. “You read these stories about whole counties running out of water. And that’s only going to get worse. [To address] the climate issue, you need both adaptation and mitigation strategies, and those mitigation strategies probably become most efficacious at the megaregion scale.” 

The RGGI initiative in the Northeast offers one example of how that kind of collaboration can work; the current water crisis in the desert Southwest offers another. There, tough times have, somewhat paradoxically, made for closer connections. Communities and governments have looked toward their neighbors and realized that they can do more together. 

The seven U.S. states that rely on water from the Colorado River, along with Mexico, have historically had an extremely contentious relationship. Yet, while recent headlines scream about impending water catastrophe, those parties have for more than 20 years been quietly working together on agreements intended to minimize the collective damage that they might suffer. A sense of partnership, however tenuous and prone to ongoing tensions, has been supplanting longstanding parochial attitudes toward the river.  

As metro regions melt together and global challenges ramp up, a growing sense of shared fate with historically distant neighbors could help tackle all kinds of problems that might once have seemed insurmountable. 

“I think one of the things we need to do is redefine ‘home,’ and the Southwest is Exhibit A on why that needs to happen,” Yaro says. “I think it’s redefining home at this larger scale. The final boundaries are going to depend on an individual community’s sense of association with their neighbors—but the place doesn’t succeed unless we do that.” 

Matt Jenkins is a freelance writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications. 

Lead image: The United States seen from space at night. Credit: DKosig via iStock.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full conversation is available as a Land Matters podcast. 

Jesse Arreguín was elected mayor of Berkeley, California, in 2016, becoming the first Latino to hold the office and, at 32, the youngest mayor in a century. The son and grandson of farmworkers, Arreguín grew up in San Francisco. At nine, he helped lead efforts to name a city street after activist Cesar Chavez, beginning a lifelong commitment to social justice.  

After Arreguín graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, he stayed in the city, serving on boards including the Housing Advisory Commission, Rent Stabilization Board, Zoning Adjustments Board, Planning Commission, and City Council. As mayor, Arreguín—who is also president of the Association of Bay Area Governments—has prioritized affordable housing, infrastructure, and education. He recently met with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint at City Hall to talk about this city of 125,000, with a focus on housing and the task of building more of it. Fittingly, the sounds of construction could be heard outside the fifth-floor office suite. 

ANTHONY FLINT: It seems like Berkeley has become a national symbol of the YIMBY/NIMBY [Yes in My Back Yard/Not in My Back Yard] divide. What should developers be contributing to increase supply, provide different housing options, and increase density at appropriate locations? 

JESSE ARREGUÍN: I think a lot needs to be done by government, and we’re seeing a lot of leadership being demonstrated by our governor, by the state legislature, by our attorney general, who established a housing strike force to enforce state housing laws, and by regional and local government. In Berkeley, over the past several years, we have taken significant steps to pass laws to streamline production and encourage a variety of different housing options in our community. 

We’ve also made a commitment that we are going to end exclusionary zoning. I think part of the reason why Berkeley is a symbol of the debate happening in cities throughout the country is because Berkeley is the birthplace of exclusionary zoning. In 1916, the city adopted its first zoning ordinance to zone the neighborhoods in the Elm-wood District as single-family to prevent the construction of a dance hall. Not surprisingly, many people who would frequent that dance hall would predominantly be people of color. Sadly, single-family zoning was founded on the foundation of racial exclusion. 

My perspective on zoning, on housing issues, has evolved over the years, because the crisis in Berkeley and in California has worsened significantly in the past five years. We have increasing numbers of people who are experiencing homelessness, tent encampments on our streets, working families who can’t afford to live in the community they work in, students who can’t afford to live in the community they go to school in. The status quo is not working, and we need to take bold action. 

I think developers are eager to see leadership on the part of government. We need to meet them at the middle and we have to do what we can to make it easier for them to build. At the same time, we have to make sure that they are providing community benefits while we are seeing market-rate construction, particularly in communities where we’ve seen significant amounts of displacement and gentrification. We have historically Black neighborhoods where we’re seeing homes sell at $2 million. Our Black population has declined from 20 percent in 1970 to seven percent now. I think that is a direct result of the decisions that government made to not build housing, and of the astronomical cost of housing in Berkeley. 

AF: Let’s talk about gentrification and real estate speculation, a problem in many cities. Los Angeles recently started a program of land banking parcels near transit stations. Is that the kind of thing that is going to be necessary when you’re obviously in white-hot market conditions here? 

JA: I think so, and we are prioritizing public land for affordable housing. We’ve converted parking lots to affordable housing projects. We have one being constructed right up the street, 140 units of affordable housing and permanent supportive housing—the largest project we’ve ever built for housing the homeless. We need to prioritize public land for public good. There’s no question about that. 

I do agree we need to look at land banking. We need to provide money so nonprofit developers can buy parcels to keep them permanently affordable. We need to look at how we can support land trusts, not just buying properties but buying buildings to keep them permanently affordable. That is part of Berkeley’s housing strategy. It’s not just building new construction, but also the preservation of existing naturally occurring affordable housing. I think we need to focus on the three P’s, and I say this often: production of new housing, preservation of existing naturally occurring affordable housing, and protection of existing residents from displacement. 

AF: How might a vacancy tax, similar to what we see in San Francisco and Oakland, address this issue of the burgeoning value of land? 

JA: We actually recently placed on the ballot a residential vacancy tax, which is a little bit different from Oakland’s; it doesn’t focus on vacant parcels, but it’s focused on vacant homes and vacant residential units. There are some who have said, “Well, we have thousands of vacant units, and therefore, we don’t need to build more housing.” That’s absurd. We need to build housing, and we also need to put housing that is off the market back on the market. 

The more that we can address actions by speculators and by scofflaws—I would characterize people who keep properties blighted and vacant for many years as scofflaws—it will address the artificial constraining of the market and will put more units back on the market. We spent a lot of time crafting this vacancy tax and really thought through the situations in which units could be vacant legitimately. The focus is not on small property owners but on owners of large rental properties, because part of what we are seeing is, frankly, speculation of the market. 

We hope, at some point, we don’t have to charge a tax because all the housing is being rented or is being used. That’s the goal of the vacancy tax, not to penalize but to incentivize owners of multifamily properties to use the properties for their intended purpose. I just have to say once again that this is not a panacea, this is not the solution to the housing crisis, and that we need to build new housing. What we have is a crisis that is decades in the making through deliberate actions on the part of government, through racial segregation or redlining, through fierce resistance to building housing, and through policies that have constrained the production of housing. 

AF: As a hub of innovation, Berkeley has a thriving economy. Do you believe it’s going to be possible for more workers in Berkeley to be able to live in Berkeley, or is there a built-in imbalance that you just have to manage and come to terms with? 

JA: I think it’s possible . . . but that’s going to require that we build thousands and thousands of units of housing, that we prioritize building housing around our transit stations, that we look at upzoning low-density commercial neighborhoods, that we look at building multifamily housing in residential neighborhoods. Every part of our city needs to meet its responsibility to create more housing. No part of our community can be walled off to new people living here. 

I really do think that that gets to the core of who we are, who we say we are as a city. Are we a city of equity and inclusivity? If we are, then we need to welcome new people living in our community. We create those opportunities for people to live here. People who previously lived here and were displaced, people who work here but can’t afford to live here, and obviously, there’s a climate benefit we can give people to not have to drive an hour, two hours to get to Berkeley. 

That reduces those cars on the road, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and helps us mitigate the impacts of climate change, and building dense, transit-oriented development is a critical part of taking bold climate action. Our land use policies and our actions to encourage more dense housing are really critical climate action strategies. 

AF: Could you talk about the importance of bicycle and pedestrian safety in your view of how the city functions and how Berkeley is doing in that regard? 

JA: Because we have such high numbers of people who bike to work and walk and use alternative modes of transportation, we need to make it safer and easier for people to get around town. Sadly, we’ve seen an increasing number of collisions between cars and bicyclists, and pedestrians. Like many communities, we’ve adopted a vision zero policy that’s focused on reducing traffic injuries and fatalities. We are looking at how we can redesign and reconstruct our streets to make them safer for people who walk and bike. . . . Then, obviously, being the home of the University of California, we have a lot of young people who are constantly walking, biking around, and we need to make it safer for students and for our residents to get out of their cars and to choose non–carbon intensive modes of mobility. 

AF: On climate, what else can Berkeley do? How is this region addressing the climate crisis? 

JA: I think the best way for Berkeley to address the climate crisis is through recognizing, one, it’s not a crisis, it’s an emergency—and we see the real material effects of it here in California. We’ve had some of the most devastating wildfires in California history over the last five years, [and] Berkeley is not immune to the threat of wildfire. That’s a pretty telltale sign that the climate emergency is here, it’s not going away, and we have to recognize that we need to take bold action. 

I’m proud that Berkeley has really been a leader in combating climate change. We were one of the first cities to adopt a climate action plan. Obviously, building dense infill housing is a critical part of that. We do need to promote more electric mobility, whether it’s through micro-mobility or through converting heavy-duty and light-duty vehicles to electric, and California’s really been a leader at that. While there are very ambitious targets that the state has set to transition our vehicle fleet to electric, we don’t have the infrastructure to support that yet. We hope with the new federal bipartisan infrastructure law and the climate law that was just passed that there’ll be significantly more resources available that we can leverage to expand that infrastructure in California. 

Electrifying our buildings is important too, and Berkeley was the first city in California to adopt the ban on natural gas and require that newly constructed buildings be all electric. We’re also looking at how we can get existing buildings to be electric, which is much tougher. . . . All those things are important, but we also have to adapt to climate change . . . whether it’s how we address wildfire risk or sea-level rise. Berkeley’s along the San Francisco Bay. We know that parts of our city, unless we do something, are going to see significant flooding and inundation. 

That’s where I think the regional approach comes in. These [issues] can’t be solved by one city. A lot of work’s been done at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments—our regional planning agency and council of governments—to bring government agencies together to explore strategies. I think that’s an area where regionalism and regional government’s going to make a difference. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, contributing editor to Land Lines, and host of the Land Matters podcast. 

Berkeley, California, might be described as a victim of its own success—a roaring innovation economy, a college town, and a hugely popular place to live, minutes from Oakland and San Francisco, but plagued by a staggering lack of affordability, rampant real estate speculation, and homelessness. 
 
When it comes to new housing development, much of the narrative in recent years has been framed in terms of two camps: those who oppose neighborhood infill development, labeled as proclaiming “not in my backyard,” and advocates of dramatically increased supply of different kinds of housing, under the banner of YIMBY—“yes in my backyard.” 
 
In an interview for the Land Matters podcast, Mayor Jesse Arreguín makes it clear he believes the more housing, the better. 

“We need to build new housing,” he said, in a recent interview at Berkeley City Hall. “What we have is a crisis that is decades in the making through deliberate actions on the part of government, through racial segregation or redlining, through fierce resistance to building housing, and through policies that have constrained the production of housing, and now we’re in a crisis. I think a crisis and emergency requires that we take emergency action. That’s why we are embracing building more housing—and we will continue to build lots more housing, because we think that is the solution to addressing our housing crisis.” 
 
Arreguín was elected mayor in 2016, becoming the first Latino to hold the office and, at 32, the youngest mayor in a century. He was reelected with over 65 percent of the vote in 2020. The son and grandson of farmworkers, Arreguín grew up in San Francisco. At nine, he helped lead efforts to name a city street after activist Cesar Chavez, beginning a lifelong commitment to social justice. 
 
After he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, he stayed in the city, serving on numerous boards overseeing planning and zoning, and ultimately the city council. He is also now president of the Association of Bay Area Governments, which is the Bay Area’s Council of Governments and regional planning agency. 

Arreguín came into office mindful of the concerns of established residents who expressed skepticism about allowing additional height and density, but says the situation is so dire, creative solutions are in order—in keeping with the area’s reputation for innovation in the private sector. 
 
“We are looking at innovation, not just in terms of scientific research, but from a government perspective, innovation in creating public policy,” he said. “I see Berkeley as an innovation lab, a test lab for new approaches to public policy, which is why we’re really thinking intentionally about how we can create solutions to housing and homelessness, and a lot of the other challenges facing cities in 2022.” 

An edited version of the interview is available online at Land Lines magazine, as the latest installment of the Mayor’s Desk feature. 

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Further Reading 
 
From Downtown to Single-Family Blocks, Berkeley Eyes Big Zoning Changes (Berkeleyside) 

Through the Roof: What Communities Can Do About the High Cost of Rental Housing in America (Land Lines) 

Backyard Brouhaha: Could Inclusionary Housing Break the YIMBY Deadlock? (Land Lines) 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. 

Given the high cost of infrastructure investments, picking the right projects is important. Three chapters in the Lincoln Institute book Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives describe how cost-benefit analysis has come to be almost universally applied by governments and international financial institutions for evaluating infrastructure projects, despite some notable limitations—and how investment decisions are affected by biases and politics. 

The Development of Cost-Benefit Analysis 

Don Pickrell, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, describes the evolution and methodological challenges of cost-benefit analysis in a chapter on economic evaluation. As he explains, a mid-nineteenth-century French engineer, Jules Dupuit, is widely credited as the originator of cost-benefit analysis. Dupuit’s main concern was to determine whether the investment in a new infrastructure facility, such as a bridge, was worthwhile; he proposed that the test should be whether the benefits to the bridge’s direct users—for example, savings in time, labor, fuel, and other areas—exceeded the cost of building and maintaining the bridge. 

This focus on direct user benefits has long been criticized by some for ignoring the wider economic impacts of infrastructure. Proponents of the wider impact approach argue that the time savings and other benefits to direct users may be passed on to downstream firms, allowing them to implement further productivity improvements. They argue that ignoring these impacts will understate the benefits of the project to society as a whole. Pickrell explains that over the years, researchers have attempted to measure these wider economic impacts by building models of the entire economy that include estimates of the effects of changes in the productivity of infrastructure on the productivity of other sectors  

This approach—building models to estimate both the direct and wider economic impacts of a project—did not prove popular with researchers or governments until the last decade, when several researchers returned to the topic. Pickrell speculates that the use of these economy-wide models was discouraged in part by the need to estimate, or assume, so many parameters. The models are also less suitable for choosing from a number of individual infrastructure projects—the task officials were typically charged with—than for evaluating economy-wide reforms. 

Skeptics of the approach also argued that the wider economic impacts identified were often not new and additional impacts, but rather transfers of impacts from the direct users to other parties. The opening of a new bridge, for example, usually stimulates an uptick in property values and the construction of new housing or other developments nearby. Land values and housing increase primarily because the bridge makes travel faster; to count the property value or new housing as benefits along with the travel time savings to the direct users would be to count the same benefit twice. 

In practice, a consensus has emerged that wider economic impacts can be included without double-counting if they involve the correction of inefficiencies in the affected downstream markets. Examples include environmental costs and benefits imposed on third parties, the general improvements in productivity caused by the growth of urban agglomerations, or reductions in prices caused by an increase in competition from the breakup of a monopoly.  

The development of cost-benefit analysis into a tool used almost universally by governments and international financial institutions to evaluate major public infrastructure projects is remarkable. The practice has been encouraged in large part, Pickrell explains, because it has become increasingly sophisticated over the last century.  

Despite the value of cost-benefit analysis, the relatively few studies of its influence on the actual choices of government produced discouraging results: the highest-ranked projects are rarely selected, the research shows. Defenders of cost-benefit analysis argue, however, that the real advantage of this approach is unlikely to be the selection of the best project over the second-best alternative, but rather the elimination of some of the worst from consideration. 

Optimism Bias 

Cost-benefit analysis is not perfect. A careful analysis in chapter 7 by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University and statistician Dirk Bester reveals overwhelming statistical evidence that costs tend to be strongly underestimated, while benefits are strongly overestimated. Their amazing dataset includes 2,062 infrastructure projects representing six investment types in 104 developed and developing countries, which were put in service between 1927 and 2011. 

Forecasting errors are often blamed on proximate changes in project design or environment, such as unforeseen increases in scope or complexity, higher than expected inflation, lower than expected competition, and various similar factors. But Flyvbjerg and Bester argue that the root causes of the errors are well-known behavioral limitations, especially optimism bias and overconfidence bias. This observation suggests that improving forecasting will be difficult because the problems are so deeply ingrained in human nature. Flyvbjerg and Bester make specific recommendations for reforming cost-benefit analysis, such as debiasing and giving consultants a financial stake in the accuracy of their forecasts. 

Politics of Excess or Shortfall 

In chapter 8, John Donahue of Harvard’s Kennedy School describes the political forces that lead to excesses or shortfalls of public spending for infrastructure. Donahue explores the school of public choice economics, whose theoreticians assume that individuals rationally pursue their self-interest in a democratic society governed by voting rules of various kinds. 

Not surprisingly, the answer to the question of whether this pursuit will result in excess or shortfall depends on one’s assumptions about how well informed the voters are as well as the voting rules. For example, one famous public choice scholar, Anthony Downs, argues that spending will be less than optimal mostly because voters tend to underestimate benefits more than they underestimate costs. Another scholar, Mancur Olson, argues that spending on public goods is driven by coalitions, which are often most effective when they are small, or when they can devise perks—e.g., roadside assistance from the American Automobile Association—for those who join them. Finally, Gordon Tullock demonstrates how majority voting to determine whether to fund similar projects would lead to overspending, because the proponents of each project have incentives to exchange support with the proponents of the other projects (a practice known as log rolling). 

All three chapters inform the reader about the strengths and weakness of cost-benefit analysis, the existence of optimism biases driven by human nature, and how public choices influence the level of public spending for infrastructure. Knowing more about these factors can help improve decision making for public infrastructure investments. 

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. They are the editors of Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives. 

Image: Construction of a bridge in downtown Miami. Credit: CHUYN via istock/Getty Images Plus.

This interview, which has been edited for length, is also available as a Land Matters podcast. 

A native Vermonter who was first elected in 2012, Miro Weinberger is serving his fourth term as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He attended Yale and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and worked for Habitat for Humanity before founding his own affordable housing development company. He’s also a part-time athlete, playing catcher in an amateur over-35 baseball league. 

Vermont has long been a progressive kind of place with a population dedicated to environmental measures, whether solar and wind power, electric vehicles, or sustainable farming practices. Burlington, its change-agent capital—the place that gave rise to Bernie Sanders, who served as mayor from 1981 to 1989—became the first city in the country to source 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014, a goal set in 2004. Now Weinberger and other leaders are building on that foundation, committing to shifting the city’s energy, transportation, and building sectors away from fossil fuels entirely. 

ANTHONY FLINT: Tell us about this ambitious goal of becoming a net-zero energy city by 2030. What is that going to look like, and what are the steps to make that happen? 

MIRO WEINBERGER: As a result of decades of commitment to more efficient buildings and weatherization, Burlington uses less electricity as a community in 2022 than we did in 1989, despite the proliferation of new electrical devices and whatnot . . . that sounds exceptional, and it is. If the rest of the country had followed that trajectory, we’d have something like 200 less coal-burning plants today than we do. 

When we became a 100 percent renewable electricity city in 2014, there was enormous interest in how Burlington had gotten here. After talking to film crews from South Korea and France and answering question after question about how we did this, I came to think we had achieved it for two big reasons. One, there was political will. Second, we had a city-owned electric department that had a lot of technical expertise and that was able to make this transformation to renewables affordable. 

The way we are defining net zero is to essentially not use fossil fuels in—or have a net-zero fossil-fuel use in—three sectors. For the electricity sector, we’re already there. That gets [us] about 25 percent toward the total goal. The [others are the] ground transportation sector and the thermal sector—how we heat and cool our buildings. 

The big strategies are electrifying everything, electrifying all the cars and trucks that are based here in Burlington. Moving the heating and cooling of our buildings to various electric technologies, the most common one probably being cold-climate heat pumps. Then, rounding out the strategies, we are looking to implement a district energy system that would capture waste heat [from the city’s biomass facility] and use it to heat some of our major institutional buildings. Then we also are making changes to our transportation network to make active transportation account for more of our vehicle trips and bring down fossil-fuel use that way as well. Those are the major roadmap strategies. 

AF: Is there one component of this that you have found particularly tough in terms of trying to go citywide? 

MW: In general, I’ve been really pleased with our progress. We actually found in our first update in 2021, we were on target to meet this incredibly ambitious goal of essentially phasing out fossil fuels by 2030. Part of that, admittedly, was that, as we all know, 2020 was a pretty exceptional year and we did see transportation-related emissions drop as a result of the pandemic. We just got a new measurement and we did see some rebounding, so that we are not quite on track through two years the way we were [after] one. The rebound that happened here in Burlington was about a quarter of the nationwide rebound in emissions. Basically, we had a 1.5 percent increase in emissions after the pandemic, whereas the rest of the country grew by 6 percent. We’ve seen a rapid increase in the adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles over the last couple of years since we came forward with what we call green stimulus incentives very early in the pandemic. 

That said, I often have this sensation that we are fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back, because it is not a level playing field for new electrification and renewable technologies. The costs of burning fossil fuels are not properly reflected in the economics right now. We need a price on carbon in some form. The fact that we don’t have that holds us back. When we get that—and I do think it’s just inevitable that eventually we will get this policy right, like a growing number of jurisdictions around the world—I think we’re going to have a wind at the back of all these initiatives. It will help with everything we’re trying to do. 

AF: Now, I want to make sure I understand. Do you want everyone in the city of Burlington to operate an electric vehicle by 2030? Is it that kind of scaling up and adoption? 

MW: Basically, yes. That is what it would really take to fully achieve the goal, that or some offset investments to help us get there, but we are very serious about doing everything we can to bring about as quickly as possible this transformation.  

A year ago, we passed a zoning ordinance that [says] new construction in Burlington cannot burn fossil fuels as the primary heating source. We didn’t prohibit fossil fuels—we thought that was too onerous, and the technology’s just not there to go that far. Regulating the primary heating source can bring down the impact of a new building by as much as 85 percent. In recent weeks, the state signed off on a change to our charter that gives us the ability to go beyond that and put new regulations in place for all buildings in Burlington. By next town meeting day, next March, we plan to have in front of the voters a new ordinance that would start to put requirements in place for the transformation of mechanical systems for major new and existing buildings when they get to the end of their useful life. When water heaters break, for example, we are both going to have this strategy through our utility, offering very generous incentives, and have actual regulatory standards in place that require transformation. 

AF: I want to ask about the utilities. You mentioned Burlington Electric and then, of course, you have Green Mountain Power. How important is that piece, given that utility companies elsewhere seem to be wary of renewables and may even end up hindering that transition? 

MW: I’ve got to say, a decade in office grappling with these issues has made me a big believer in publicly owned power. All of the work that I described over the last 30-plus years, the city-owned electric department has been a big part of that. Municipalities, towns, mayors that don’t have their own electric utility, I think it’s harder. I do think there are things that any local community can do to collaborate with and, when necessary, bring public pressure to bear on utilities, which tend to have to answer to some public regulatory authority. I think that there are ways to push other utilities to do what Burlington Electric is doing. I think it’s an exciting story in Vermont that the other utility that has really been quite innovative, Green Mountain Power, is an investor-owned utility. 

If we get anywhere near this net-zero goal, it’s going to mean we’re selling a whole lot more electricity than we are now. We estimate at least 60 percent more electricity than today. Every time someone buys an electric vehicle and charges it up in Burlington now, and they do it at night, we’re able to sell them off-peak power in a way that just brings more dollars into the utility. It’s very good, the economics. That’s why we’re able to offer these very generous incentives—every time we bring another electric vehicle or heat pump online, that’s a new revenue stream to the city. These incentives in many ways largely pay for themselves with that new revenue. To me, it seems like good business sense as well to move in this direction. 

AF: Vermont has become a very popular destination for mostly affluent climate refugees [who are] buying up land and building houses. What are the pros and cons of this? 

MW: You’re right, we are seeing climate refugees here. We also had pandemic refugees. We’ve seen big new pressures on our housing markets, and that’s the downside. We’ve long had an acute housing crisis, [but] it’s worse than it’s ever been now. The silver lining of that may be it may finally force Vermont to get serious about putting in place land use rules at the local and state level that make it possible to build more housing. 

We desperately need more housing. We’ve got to get better about that, and I think there’ll be environmental benefits if we do. To me, more people living in a green city like Burlington is a good trade-off for the environment. 

AF: Are there other strategies that you have in mind for keeping or making green Burlington affordable? Burlington has a successful community land trust, you encourage accessory dwelling units, you have inclusionary zoning . . . what’s next? 

MW: We have a lot of work to do on our zoning ordinance and our statewide land use reform. Many projects in Vermont now—good projects, good green, energy-efficient projects in settled areas—have to go through both local and statewide land use permitting processes, an almost entirely redundant process that slows things down, adds a lot of costs, and creates all sorts of opportunity for obstruction. We have a lot of work to do and we’re focused on it. There are three major upzoning efforts that we’re pursuing right now and there’s a big conversation about Act 250 [Vermont’s land use and development law] reform happening in the state as well. 

AF: Finally, what advice do you have for other city leaders to take similar climate action, especially in places that aren’t primed for it quite as well as Burlington is? 

MW: Whenever I talk to other mayors about this, I try to make the point that this is an area where political leadership [and community will] can have a huge impact. When I came into office, we had almost no deployed solar here in Burlington. We made it a priority. We changed some rules about permitting. We made it easier for consumers to have solar installed on their homes. The utility played a role, and over a very small number of years, we became one of the cities in the country that had the most solar per capita. We’re number five in the country. The only city in the top 20 on the East Coast at one point, and it’s not an accident. This is making a decision to lead in this area and to make change. You can have a big impact. 

At a time when clearly the climate emergency is an existential threat, at a time when clearly the federal government is paralyzed in its ability to drive change, and when many state governments are similarly gridlocked, mayors and cities can really demonstrate on the ground progress. I think when we do that, we show everybody else what’s possible. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines. 

Image: Burlington, Vermont. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images.