1.0 Introduction
Effective transportation systems management and operation is crucial to the safety, security, efficiency, and reliability of our Nation’s transportation systems, especially as travel demand rises and terrorism threatens our mobility. Achieving effective management and operation of transportation systems on a regional level means that agencies and jurisdictions must collaborate in a deliberate and sustained fashion. Nowhere is the need for regional collaboration and coordination more evident than in metropolitan areas where numerous jurisdictions, agencies, and service providers are responsible for managing and operating a wide variety of transportation services. The public often does not know or even care whose road they are driving on, so they do not accept jurisdictional or agency boundaries as a reason why services are not being coordinated.
Collaboration between operating agencies is often on an ad hoc basis, usually limited to a project, special event, or emergency. Typically when the project, special event, or emergency ends, so does the collaborative effort. The challenge is to sustain and guide that collaborative effort to address the daily operational issues that are so important to the public and essential to improving system performance.
Regional improvements occur when agencies actively collaborate on transportation management and operations in a much more deliberate and sustained manner. Guided by a common operations vision of what needs to be achieved and how to work together to achieve it, they can produce significant results. For example:
- Agencies better manage resources during traffic incidents because real-time information on transportation system performance is shared across agencies.
- Road users have plenty of time to adjust their routes thanks to timely and relevant weather and traffic reports delivered seamlessly across jurisdictions, agencies, and modes.
- Hazardous materials moving through an urban area are electronically identified and monitored by traffic management and public safety agencies to ensure their safe, secure, and efficient intermodal movement.
What often enables any collaborative effort to produce these kinds of results is a common operations vision of what the operating agencies and other transportation stakeholders want the management and operation of the regional transportation system to look like and agreement on what must be done to make it happen. This operations vision can greatly help improve system performance by showing how agencies can work together to achieve mutual objectives for safety, reliability, mobility, and security matters. The process of creating and working to accomplish a common objective builds strong relationships between agencies and jurisdictions that can be relied upon to garner political support for operations and address other common regional operations-related issues.
A Regional Concept for Transportation Operations (RCTO) presents this common operations vision by describing a regional objective for transportation operations and what is needed to achieve that objective within a reasonably short timeframe, possibly three to five years. It is a description of the desired state for transportation operations presented as an operations objective plus a set of physical improvements that need to be implemented, relationships and procedures that must occur, and resource arrangements that are needed to accomplish the operations objective. This paper focuses what an RCTO is, what it can look like, its benefits, and its important role in creating an opportunity for regional transportation operations collaboration and coordination to flourish.
