6.0 Challenges and Opportunties
A regional concept for transportation operations requires deliberate, sustained collaboration among transportation operators and others who recognize the opportunity to improve transportation system performance in their region. The participants will face a number of significant challenges and opportunities as they work together to achieve mutual objectives. Among these challenges and opportunities are:
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Identifying and defining the basis for collaboration.
In some areas, collaboration will come as a natural outgrowth of existing relationships fostered through past projects (e.g., ITS model deployment initiative or regional ITS architecture process) and events (e.g., hosting the Olympic Games or a political convention) that brought individuals and agencies together. These collaborative activities can demonstrate the benefits of working together and provide the foundation for recognizing areas where the collaboration needed to develop an RCTO can be sustained. In other areas, collaboration will be initiated when operators and others from two or more jurisdictions identify opportunities for improving regional transportation system performance and decide to collaborate to develop an RCTO. The RCTO may begin as a single function that crosses a jurisdictional boundary but grows to include more functions and jurisdictions as the value of the RCTO becomes more evident.
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Creating a multi-jurisdictional operations perspective.
Most operating agencies are responsible to the leadership of a single jurisdiction and operate assets and provide services within a single jurisdiction (the notable exception being regional transit services). This leads operators to typically view their responsibilities from the perspective of their individual jurisdictions and agencies. An RCTO requires a larger perspective of how multiple agencies can work together across jurisdictional boundaries to improve regional transportation system performance. This view acknowledges that a regional approach to transportation systems management and operations requires jurisdictions to develop regional strategies to achieve significant gains. This view also recognizes that if jurisdictions fail to work together, regional transportation system performance will reflect the conflicting purposes, lack of coordination, system incompatibility, and parochial thinking of individual agencies and jurisdictions that attempt to achieve local objectives without a regional perspective.
A multi-jurisdictional operations vision enables the creation of a multi-jurisdictional operations objective. The challenge in developing these objectives is recognizing how cooperating agencies and jurisdictions can translate a multi-jurisdictional operations vision into a measurable and actionable objective that helps guide both the day-to-day activities of individual agencies and the investment decisions.
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Determining what can reasonably be done over three- to five-year period.
One of the challenges operating agencies face is balancing the demands of the day-to-day with longer-term planning. Operating agencies are typically most concerned with delivering services that respond to near-term imperatives and are not expected to prepare long-term (e.g., 10- to 20-year) plans. Operating agencies typically plan for budgeting purposes; for replacing, maintaining, or augmenting equipment; and for introducing new technologies and materials that will improve service delivery or administrative efficiency. Developing an RCTO helps to balance these competing imperatives of delivering service today while thinking about how best to delivery services in the future.
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Understanding what relationships and stakeholders are key to creating an RCTO.
Each multi-jurisdictional region is unique in its composition, economy, needs, and priorities. Operating agencies and others who participate in creating an RCTO must understand the “drivers” that make the region unique. This will largely determine where support is needed to develop and implement the RCTO. These stakeholders include those that use the transportation system directly (e.g., commuters, goods movers, public safety agencies), those who provide transportation services (e.g., transit agencies, toll operators, transportation authorities, DOTs, departments of public works, port authorities), and those who depend on the regional transportation to support their activities (e.g., shippers, major employers, tourists attractions, local businesses). While not all of these stakeholders may be involved in developing an RCTO, most will be affected, so their perspectives and concerns should be considered to ensure that the RCTO is robust and garners maximum political and resource support.
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Obtaining, allocating, sharing resources to achieve the multi-jurisdictional operations objective.
Perhaps the greatest challenge comes in convincing individual jurisdictions to share resources to achieve significant improvements in regional transportation system. These resources may be in-kind as when agency staff participate in regional meetings; they may be staff assignments as when jurisdictions and agencies agree to staff a regional facility with personnel from individual agencies; they may be pooled resources as when jurisdictions include in their individual budgets the resources needed to fund a joint effort. In some cases, multiple jurisdictions will need to work together to obtain grants from Federal agencies or other sources to develop and implement an RCTO which will often require some level of matching funds from State or local sources. Resource allocation and sharing requires the same level of commitment as that of setting a regional operations objective – and, in many ways, is the best evidence of how committed each jurisdiction is to achieving these objectives.
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Building on current collaborative activities occurring in the region.
In most regions, there are numerous events and projects that require multi-jurisdictional collaboration and coordination in planning and execution. For example, many areas host large festivals, conventions, or experience tremendous seasonal variation in travel demand, so neighboring jurisdictions work together to accommodate the event or period of high demand. Similarly, when major road or transit system construction or rehabilitation projects occur, neighboring jurisdictions often coordinate travel demand management and traffic management to minimize the degradation of system performance.
In recent years, increased concern for homeland security and emergency evacuation have caused neighboring jurisdictions to work together to develop plans and implement procedures and technologies for emergency situations. Activities such as these often bring together the transportation, public safety, planning, and other interests to develop and execute the most effective regional strategy for the event or activity. These collaborative activities can provide the foundation for longer-term, sustained collaboration in developing an RCTO.
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Linking planning and operations.
An RCTO can be an effective way to bring operators and planners together by providing a window through which planners see operations investments as an important option for enhancing the capacity and efficiency of the existing infrastructure. Likewise, operators see ways of introducing capital investment opportunities for operations projects into the planning process. Further, the RCTO encourages operators in a region to think together about the possibilities for improving the regional transportation system through strategic investments in operations-related projects.
