1.2 Why Link Planning and Operations?
Linking planning and operations is important to improve transportation decisionmaking and the overall effectiveness of transportation systems. Coordination between planners and operators helps ensure that regional transportation investment decisions reflect full consideration of all available strategies and approaches to meet regional goals and objectives.
Factors Motivating the Linkage
Federal Requirements: Federal requirements emphasize this linkage. One of the seven planning factors that must be considered in the planning process at both the metropolitan and statewide levels is to "promote efficient system management and operation." The planning requirements, therefore, emphasize the important role that system management and operation should take in regional planning. Through the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) certification process, the U.S. DOT considers whether these factors have been adequately assessed.
Environmental, Community, and Funding Constraints: At a practical level, increasing transportation needs and constraints faced by transportation agencies are pushing an emphasis on new solutions. At the same time communities are facing the need for mobility improvements, transportation agencies are faced with environmental, community, and funding constraints that limit their ability to build new capacity to address these needs. Moreover, the length of time if takes to complete large scale transportation infrastructure projects emphasizes the need for transportation solutions that can respond quickly to congestion, safety, and economic concerns. Given budget and other constraints, the public expects transportation agencies to operate the system at peak efficiency before providing funding to expand physical capacity.
New Technologies: New technologies and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) provide the potential for operational improvements that substantially improve system performance, and for better data to pinpoint and prioritize transportation needs. These technologies also offer opportunities to improve reliability, safety, and security, which are difficult to address with traditional highway and transit capacity.
Benefits for Planners and Operators
Greater coordination and collaboration among planners and operators can help to focus attention on investments that more effectively and efficiently address short-term and long-term needs. Stronger linkages, therefore, help both planners and operators to do their jobs better, and make better decisions that affect the public.
For planners, collaboration with operators can:
- Help planners better understand how operational strategies can meet regional transportation goals
- Provide access to system-wide 24-hour travel data that can be used to better characterize existing system performance and travel conditions, to identify the most critical transportation problems, and to prioritize funding
- Provide operations data and expertise to improve forecasts of future conditions, broaden the understanding of existing conditions, and analyze the effectiveness of alternative investments
- Foster greater consideration of the day-to-day functioning of the transportation network and the real conditions facing travelers, which can help frame transportation goals, objectives, and priorities
- Reveal how transportation plans can address issues such as reliability, security, and safety – issues that are difficult to address solely with traditional infrastructure investments
For operators, collaboration and coordination with planners can:
- Help operators have a greater understanding of how the long range planning process can support M&O activities, and how M&O activities fit into the context of regional goals and objectives.
- Provide increased opportunities and incentives for getting involved in the planning process, and thereby helping to shape system goals and objectives
- Provide regional leadership and greater participation by stakeholders in regional M&O efforts
- Clarify the role of operations in meeting the region's transportation vision and goals
- Direct attention to the value of M&O strategies
- Increase resources assigned to operations projects and programs
Benefits for System Users
Ultimately, greater coordination and collaboration among planners and operators improves transportation decision-making and benefits the traveling public, businesses, and communities.
- Improved ability to address short- and long-term needs – More detailed and varied data on traffic operations can help planners to better predict future conditions and better prioritize locations in need of system improvements. It can also bring attention to operational improvements that can be implemented in a shorter time frame than traditional infrastructure investment.
- Improved reliability – Travelers and freight shippers are increasingly sensitive to unanticipated disruptions to tightly scheduled personal activities and manufacturing supply-chain processes. Yet trip times have become increasingly unpredictable due to the growth in non-recurring congestion – unexpected or unusual congestion caused by accidents, inclement weather, special events, or construction. Growth in overall traffic volumes often means that even small disruptions can have a significant ripple effect on transportation system performance over a broad geographic area. Today, non-recurring congestion accounts for about half of all travel delay. The planning process typically deals with on-going or predictable congestion issues, and traditional infrastructure investments do not address the disruptions that are the source of non-recurrent congestion. Stronger connections between planners and operators helps planners consider programs and strategies to address reliability, such as deployment of technologies to rapidly detect incidents; variable message signs and other approaches for providing quick, reliable traffic information to the public and media outlets; and traffic signal preemption and use of roving incident response teams to quickly clear accidents to open up a roadways for full operation.
- Improved emergency preparedness – Coordination between planning and operations reinforces efforts to ensure emergency preparedness and transportation security. Regional operations planning and flexibility is a critical element of a secure transportation system. States and regions that advance operational flexibility in their planning and investment prioritization are building their capacity to address the myriad of emergency and security situations that could arise. In addition, sources of funding may be available specifically for activities that support transportation security and emergency preparedness, which can be used to support transportation M&O objectives.
