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Getting More by Working Together — Opportunities for Linking Planning and Operations


2. Opportunities for Linking Planning and Operations


2.9 Regional Concept for Transportation Operations


BACKGROUND

The previous eight sections discuss specific strategies that encourage and support linkages between planning and operations. Each of these strategies has a role within the existing regional transportation planning process. In addition, these strategies should be coordinated to support regional system management and operations. This section introduces the idea of developing a Regional Concept for Transportation Operations (RCTO), a tool for ensuring that management and operation activities build toward a common vision and relate to the broader regional planning process. An RCTO links planning and operations by providing a coherent framework for considering operations during the planning process and by supporting the linkages discussed in previous sections.24

Exhibit 13: Management and operations stakeholders who may help develop the RCTO include:

  • State DOTs
  • MPOs
  • Local planning departments
  • Local public works departments
  • Air/Sea ports
  • Local chambers of commerce
  • Transit agencies
  • Public safety/security agencies
  • Tourism bureaus
  • Major employers
  • Community groups
  • Toll authorities
  • Advocacy groups
  • Major freight shippers
  • Local jurisdictions
  • Commercial vehicle operators

Exhibit 14: Examples of services likely to benefit from regional coordination through a RCTO

  • Traffic incident management
  • Traveler information
  • Electronic payment services (e.g., transit, parking, tolls)
  • Emergency response and homeland security
  • Traffic signal coordination
  • Road weather management
  • Freight management
  • Work zone traffic management
  • Freeway management
  • Congestion management

An RCTO presents a regional objective for transportation operations and describes what is needed to achieve that objective within a reasonably short timeframe, often three to five years. The development of the RCTO should include participation by the MPO to ensure consistency with the region's vision and goals. It should also involve stakeholders that depend on regional operations coordination (see Exhibit 13). The process of developing an RCTO requires sustained collaboration among these stakeholders.

To date, only a small number of regions have developed documents similar to RCTOs. Therefore, rather than focusing on the few examples of how these instances have linked planning and operations, this section describes in general how an RCTO can support planning and operations coordination and how it can support other strategies discussed in this resource guide.

WHAT IS INCLUDED IN AN RCTO?

An RCTO can vary significantly in scope depending on the region and the range of programs it seeks to address (see Exhibit 14), but certain fundamental components must be included. An RCTO should describe 1) the operations objective, 2) the physical elements of the system, 3) relationships and procedures, and 4) resources required to achieve the RCTO goals. The issues that would typically be addressed within each of these sections are described below.

  • Operations Objective: the desired operations outcome for one or more activities or services at the end of a three- to five-year period. All stakeholders should agree upon this outcome, it should be consistent with regional goals expressed in regional planning documents, and it should be realistically achievable given the timeframe and available resources.
  • Physical Improvements: the equipment, technology, facilities, people, and systems needed to achieve the operations objective.
  • Relationships and Procedures: the working agreements, institutional arrangements, MOUs, and procedures needed to achieve the operations objective.
  • Resource Arrangements: the funding and other resource requirements (e.g., staff and equipment) and how those resources are to be obtained and applied to achieve the operations objective.

HOW CAN AN RCTO LINK PLANNING AND OPERATIONS?

An RCTO links planners and operators by helping operators participate in the planning process and by helping planners understand how operations can support the region's broader transportation goals. The RCTO builds consensus on the future of transportation operations needs. This provides stakeholders with a basis for productively participating in regional decisions. It also provides a framework for critically evaluating whether the proposed investments adequately support the operations objective.

Helping Operations Practitioners Engage in the Planning Process

Case 48: Developing the Regional Concept of Transportation Operations for the Phoenix Region

In the Phoenix metropolitan region, the need for an RCTO became clear during the process of developing the regional ITS architecture. The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) ITS Committee found that operations issues were being considered only at a very high level during the development of the architecture; there was little detailed discussion regarding how to get from the current way of doing business to the end points defined in the architecture. As a result, the committee viewed the architecture as a longer-term goal and committed to developing a shorter-term detailed regional plan for operations coordination.

When MAG's ITS Committee initiated the process of developing the Regional Concept of Transportation Operations in 2001, several organizations had already been involved in regional transportation operations coordination, including the MAG ITS Committee, AZTechTM, and the East and West Valley Traffic Signal Timing Groups. A consulting agency and a group of stakeholders from city, county, regional, State, and Federal agencies developed an initial Regional Concept of Transportation Operations. These stakeholders agreed on a common vision and mission for the region's transportation system operations. They then developed three- and five-year operational goals that would move the region toward this vision. To address these goals, the committee agreed on 11 initiatives and associated steps for action. For example, one initiative focuses on "transit signal priority" and the associated action is "plan, deploy, operate, maintain and evaluate a Transit Signal Priority pilot project." This group of stakeholders also agreed on common operational performance measures that would be used to track their progress.

The group took several steps to insure success of the newly formed initiatives:

  • It developed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to be signed by each participating agency. The intent of the MOU is to acquire commitment from the participants to work towards the initiatives and coordinate with one another in managing and operating the region's transportation system.
  • Existing regional forums or committees and a champion were assigned responsibility for one or more initiatives. The champion's duties included being a leader for the area and reporting on the progress at the MAG ITS Committee meetings.
  • It committed to developing a guidance document that will help agencies to implement the actions described in the RCTO (currently underway).

MAG's current RCTO and additional discussion of the development process are available online: http://www.mag.maricopa.gov/project.cms ?item=1395

Contact Sarath Joshua: sjoshua@mag.maricopa.gov

Case 49: A Concept of Operations for Bay Area Freeways

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MPO for California's Bay Area Region) played a key role in developing a concept of operations to improve freeway management. MPO staff members coordinated closely with the State DOT and the California Highway Patrol to develop the Bay Area Freeway Concept of Operations Project in 2001. This effort built on existing coordination of freeway congestion management, incident management, and traveler information programs. The project pursued three objectives:

  • Identify potential improvements to policies, procedures, and practices would enhance regional agency coordination
  • Define roles, responsibilities, and resources for freeway operations.
  • Develop a plan of action for improving freeway operations.

The project received input from top agency executives, agency staff, and a range of public agency stakeholders. Immediate results have included a regional consensus defining what freeway operations should look like in the near future, definition of some measurable objectives, and a plan for how the participating agencies can meet these new expectations. Some of the recommended strategies include integrating incident detection, developing overall data and video sharing policy, and detailing a staffing and funding program.

Contact Rod McMillan: rmcmillan@mtc.ca.gov

An RCTO can prepare management and operations practitioners to be effective contributors within the transportation planning process.

  • An RCTO addresses a longer time horizon and a broader geographic range than is typical for operations strategies. As a result, the RCTO allows operations practitioners to link their programs with future capital investments and potential operations funding sources.
  • An RCTO builds commitment among stakeholders for a common regional approach to operations (see Case 48). Operations managers will have greater influence in the planning process when diverse stakeholders have reached consensus on an operations objective for the region.
  • Though longer than typical operations plans, the three- to five-year timeframe of the RCTO is shorter than many planning documents. The RCTO is therefore more likely to maintain interest of operations-minded stakeholder groups. These are groups that may not engage in the 20-year regional planning process. In this way, the RCTO serves as a bridge between stakeholders focused on very short-term operations needs and those focused on the long-term evolution of the regional transportation system. In addition, the RCTO's 3 to 5 year timeframe facilitates coordination with the TIP (also 3 to 5 years).

Helping Planners Promote Management and Operations

An RCTO can help planners and decisionmakers by relating management and operations to broader regional goals and by describing individual operations programs within a broader regional operations strategy.

  • An RCTO links management and operations strategies with regional goals and objectives. This helps planners see the benefits of regional operations investments and creates a common understanding of regional management and operations.
  • An RCTO illustrates how individual management and operations projects and programs fit into a broader strategy for regional transportation efficiency (see Case 49). In this way, an RCTO helps planners consider how capital projects can be implemented in a way that complements existing operations strategies.
  • By providing a coherent operations strategy for consideration during the planning process, an RCTO enables decisionmakers to fund critical operations initiatives and understand how they support regional goals. In this way, an RCTO provides elected officials who must approve transportation plans and programs with justification for promoting regional benefits through local operations decisions.

Through the mechanisms outlined above, an RCTO allows regional planners and operations managers to be proactive about coordinating operations strategies to serve regional objectives.

HOW CAN AN RCTO SUPPORT LINKAGE OPPORTUNITIES DISCUSSED IN THIS GUIDE?

From the discussion above, it should be clear that the RCTO links planning and operations in ways similar to the strategies discussed in previous sections of this resource guide (Sections 2.2 to 2.8). In fact, the RCTO can be a valuable tool for integrating all of these strategies to improve planning and operations coordination. The following discussion gives some examples of how the RCTO supports the linkage opportunities discussed in these previous sections.

  • Data Sharing (Section 2.2): The RCTO is an opportunity to increase regional data sharing. As discussed in Section 2.2, incompatible or conflicting data between various agencies and jurisdictions frequently impede efforts to use of such data for operations and planning. The RCTO is an opportunity to highlight the benefits of improved data consistency, awareness, and accessibility. By understanding such benefits, agencies can reasonably evaluate tradeoffs and consider compromises relating to data standards and protocols.
  • Performance Measures (Section 2.3): An RCTO can provide a basis for developing management and operations performance measures. Because the RCTO defines regional operations objectives, physical needs, institutional relationships, and resource needs, it is the ideal place to define metrics to assess the region's progress in each of these areas.
  • Congestion Management Systems (Section 2.4): The RCTO can help ensure that individual management and operations projects build toward integrated regional transportation objectives. Goals for management and operations may stretch beyond traditional congestion management to include objectives such as travel time reliability and intermodal coordination. The RCTO can provide a framework so that individual operations projects and programs within the CMS are not implemented in an ad-hoc fashion but, rather, contribute to an integrated strategy.
  • Funding and Resource Sharing (Section 2.5): The RCTO allows operations funding to be targeted toward a specific operations objective and reveals opportunities for efficient resource sharing. Section 2.5 described how funding for operations is frequently allocated under broad categories (such as "management and operations") with little specific reference to the activities that are to be funded. An RCTO provides a more complete regional operations vision that helps define specific programs during the planning stage. This can raise the profile of management and operations programs among elected officials and the public.

In addition, by defining some common operations goals among diverse stakeholders, the RCTO can identify equipment and other resource needs that are common to several agencies. This creates an opportunity to identify particular equipment that might be jointly purchased and shared by a number of agencies, or to coordinate common technology or software to enhance compatibility and efficiency. Raising such opportunities a year or two in advance is critical for developing coordinated strategies.

  • Institutional Arrangements (Section 2.6): Regular stakeholder forums and interjurisdictional meetings are familiar to participants in the regional planning process. However, some operating agencies may be less accustomed to such practices, and may question whether they are a valuable use of time and resources. The RCTO provides an important framework for ensuring that such forums are directed toward clearly defined and pragmatic operations coordination. Initially, meetings to prepare and advance the RCTO may be the only forums where the participating stakeholders can focus on regional operations thinking. The RCTO also offers an opportunity to forge needed relationships with non-transportation agencies (such as emergency response and security agencies).
  • Regional ITS Architecture (Section 2.7): Components of an RCTO correspond with components of the Regional ITS architecture discussed in Section 2.7. For example, an RCTO's "relationships and procedures" section should complement a regional ITS architecture's discussion of critical agency relationships and information sharing. Where a regional architecture exists, it should both inform and draw support from the RCTO. In regions where there is no regional ITS architecture, the RCTO will help ensure that the architecture is developed in a way that informs immediate operations decisionmaking and links to broad regional goals and objectives.
  • Regional M&O Projects (Section 2.8): The RCTO is directly related to the implementation of regional M&O projects. Section 2.8 describes the common practice of allocating authority for all operations to local jurisdictions. The RCTO offers a means by which local organizations can maintain such control of their own management and operations projects and programs while increasing the likelihood that these programs will build toward an integrated regional management strategy.

THE FUTURE OF THE RCTO

Implementing an RCTO involves significant challenges. For example, there will be challenges in directing resources toward a new regional coordination effort. There will be challenges in identifying stakeholders with the technical knowledge necessary to develop the RCTO yet with sufficient decisionmaking authority to commit resources and formalize relationships. And of course, there will be challenges in building regional consensus on operations priorities. Based on the RCTO's potential for linking planning and operations and improving the efficiency of existing investments, these challenges are well worth facing. Existing experience with concepts similar to RCTOs offers reason to be optimistic.

24 For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Regional Concept for Transportation Operations: A Tool for Strengthening and Guiding Regional Transportation Operations Collaboration and Communication, FHWA, http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/rcto_white_paper/index.htm.

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