Mainstreaming Integrated Corridor Management: An Executive Level Primer

Chapter 1. Introduction

Consider all of the pre-planning that exists for special events like college and professional game days, parades, and protest marches. Often, weeks of planning occur, involving many agencies, contingencies, and mitigations. Secondary routes, modes, and messages are all enlisted to help defray the congestion. The event subsumes the better part of that day. Now imagine a similar, but unplanned event, like a truck-overturn, or a severe weather event, or phantom backup, that would otherwise occupy many hours' delay. In the latter case, ICM engages in real-time to diffuse the situation and mitigate the event.

Transportation operations in corridors are handled largely independently and siloed, often resulting in increased congestion and reduced returns on incident management and response. Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) incorporates the entire region (aka, the "travel shed," explained later) in responding to the incident or delay, instead of just the facility. Starting in 2006, to address growing congestion and reduced mobility along urban corridors, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) began research into the integration of the operations of all the transportation networks (e.g., freeway, arterial, transit, rail, etc.) within a corridor to maximize their effectiveness of incident management and reduce congestion, creating the ICM program. ICM is defined as "an approach designed to actively monitor, assess, and respond to atypical recurring and nonrecurring events that impact traffic on the most visibly congested highways or freeways that define a corridor."² Simply put, it is more than just a locational detour.

Purpose and Audience

The purpose of this primer is to provide executive level public sector decision-makers and transportation officials with an understanding of ICM, how to build off the previous experience, best practices, and lessons learned from the ICM Program, and further empower transportation officials to mainstream ICM practices in their transportation planning, project development, and operations practices to help address transportation problems and mobility issues. The purpose is not to delve deeply into the Concept of Operations or mechanisms of ICM. The target audience for this primer are public sector and executive-level transportation officials wishing to implement mainstreamed ICM in their region.

Organization and How to Use this Primer

The primer is organized as shown below.

• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Background on ICM
• Chapter 3 Motivation and Readiness for ICM
• Chapter 4 Mainstreaming ICM
• Chapter 5 Funding ICM
• Chapter 6 Resources for Next Steps

This chapter serves as the introduction. Chapter 2 provides the background on the concept of ICM and discusses the characteristics of ICM as compared to traditional traffic management practices. Chapter 2 also presents an overview of the federal ICM program as it evolved over the last decade and offers insight into the cities and agencies who participated in the program-sponsored ICM planning and deployment activities. Chapter 3 provides more information on the motivation and business case to deploy ICM and offers readiness criteria for you to carefully consider prior to embarking on ICM implementation. This will help you to know whether ICM is the right solution for your transportation corridor.

For agencies that are interested in implementing ICM, chapter 4 presents material on how you can effectively integrate ICM as part of your regional transportation business processes. Mainstreaming ICM as a part of regional transportation systems management and operations activities is necessary for success over the long term. Until recently, most ICM deployment and implementation planning activities were facilitated by federal grant money. Part of the mainstreaming message is that typical funding sources for operational improvements need to be applied to grow and evolve your ICM System (ICMS). Chapter 5 provides an overview of these funding sources and chapter 6 offers resources if you want to find out more about ICM.

It is hoped that this primer will be read by top officials (executives) within transportation agencies and then widely shared with management and other leaders within those agencies. Regarding how to use this document, the reader may wish to read the introduction in order to determine which chapters and sections are most relevant to their situation. For example, if you already have a solid understanding of ICM and the USDOT ICM program, you may wish to skip chapter 2. If your region has already decided to implement ICM in a specific corridor or corridors, you should consider jumping to chapter 4 to learn about mainstreaming best practices. In addition, key stakeholders in the region should be brought together to discuss these mainstreaming ideas during an appropriate meeting or venue.