National Transportation Operations Coalition (NTOC)Talking Operations Webinar Series

Sustaining Regional Collaboration in Planning for OperationsJune 12, 2012

Alex BondHello everyone and welcome to the NTOC webinar on sustaining regional cooperation and planning for operations. This webinar is part of the National Transportation Operation Coalition’s planning for operations webinar series. This is sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration. I'm going to give you a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment and then we will turn the session over to our first speaker. Today's webinar will last about an hour and a half. We are allotting 60 minutes for the presenters and 30 minutes for questions and answers. This webinar is being recorded by audio recording and by closed captioning. We will send you links on how to retrieve those after the webinar.

You have the option to listen to this webinar through VOIP on your computer or through a teleconference on your phone. Just remember to turn your computer speakers on, and if you are using the VOIP option you can hang up your phone now. There is no reason to operate both at the same time. During the presentation if you can think of a question, please type in the small text box on the left side of your screen. We will use them for discussions later. Please send your question to everyone so that all participants can see. Our presenters will not answer them during their presentation. We will reserve 30 minutes at the end so they may address them. A file containing the audio and visual portions of the seminar will be posted to the website in about a week. I will type the URL into the chat box so you can see how that works. All registered attendees will be notified when the presentation and audio files are available. Everyone can visit the URL. So, anyone in your office who was not able to attend today is welcome to view the recording at the NTOC website. The presentations are available for download in the file download box, which is on the bottom left on your screen. To download a file, you click on the file name with your mouse and click the button that says “save to my computer.”

We have four speakers making three presentations, and I would like to introduce them now. Robert Case is a principal transportation engineer with the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization. He leads a team of engineers who staff the Hampton Roads Transportation Operations Subcommittee and perform congestion analysis, military studies, and freight studies. In addition, through the development and application of mathematical models, Mr. Case has performed work in areas such as long range transportation planning, non-driver mobility, and hurricane evacuation. Mr. Case is a licensed professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a registered Professional Transportation Operations Engineer (PTOE), and a fellow of ASCE. He received a BS in Civil Engineering from Old Dominion University and an MS in Civil Engineering from Georgia Tech.

We have two speakers from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, Bala Akundi is a principal transportation engineer with BMC. They provide technical support to the Metropolitan planning organization in and around Baltimore. He is a part of a policy team working on management and operations, congestion management, traffic signal operations, ITS, freight movement and safety. Bala has a Master’s degree in transportation engineering from Virginia Tech and has over 20 years of

experience in traffic engineering studies, traffic engineering analysis and design, transportation planning studies, travel demand modeling, traffic data collection analysis, and ITS.

Eileen Singleton, also with BMC, has over 20 years of experience as an engineer. She joined BMC in 1998 and is currently a principal transportation engineer. She plans and supports projects and committees with Baltimore MPO that focus on enhancing safety, security, and efficiency of the region's transportation system through improved management and operations. Eileen has a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell and a Master’s of Science degree in civil engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a registered professional engineer in Maryland.

Our last speaker is Bob Hart. He has worked for more than 30 years in the area of regional transportation with Metropolitan Planning Organization. He began his career with Oregon Metro and has worked at RTC since 1990. During his time at RTC, he has worked extensively on multimodal transportation corridor studies, high-capacity transit planning, and air quality planning. Bob also serves the RTC agency as lead for bi-state transportation studies with Oregon. He has managed RTC’s intelligent transportation system called the Vancouver Area Smart Trek since 2001. He also leads the regions recently completed Transportation Assistance Management Operations Plan.

Our first speaker is Wayne Berman from the Federal Highways Office of Operations. He is going to give us an introduction to the planning for operations initiative. Wayne?

Wayne BermanGreat. Thanks, Alex and thanks to all of you for joining us today. I want to take a couple of minutes here in the beginning to talk a little bit about collaboration and its importance to us and to the whole program. I think you will see today through the speakers how important collaboration is regionally and locally. We've developed a significant program of collaboration particularly in the plan for operations program over the last decade, and it is really kind of a foundational piece, if you will, for the planning for operations program. We believe collaboration is essential within agencies as well as within jurisdictions and between agencies and jurisdictions. Collaboration is essential to help build relationships, build coordination between agencies and operating organization, and to ultimately move towards better integration of services. That collaborative piece is essential. It is essential to develop operations objectives and performance measures more and more in the economic nature of our society now. The government really begins to lead us to collaboration and more coordination.

We've seen in a lot of our work that collaboration has some tangible benefits and that it can increase the quantity and quality of the resources available to different agencies. For example access to funding, job training, shared expertise, group purchasing technology standards across agencies and jurisdictions, and shared infrastructure and better technology. Collaboration can also lead to improvements in agency operations and productivity, such as expanded service areas for transit and for travel information services, increased operating hours particularly for traffic control centers, information sharing, standards and protocols, and improved responsiveness and greater efficiency. Finally, collaboration can lead to better outcomes to help agencies achieve their goals. For example, fewer crashes, improved air quality, lower fuel consumption, shorter travel times, better reliability on the system, and improved travel decisions.

So, a lot of our program over the years has been built to foster these benefits and articulate these benefits to agencies, NPOs, states, and others. What you see on the screen in front of you are some of the foundational pieces that we have developed over the years, and you see the website down there where they are available.

The first piece in 2003 was really designed to put collaboration and coordination on the table for many of these agencies, and it really talks about the importance of it in terms of sustaining and building coordination and integration.

The 2007 piece on the regional concept for transportation operations is about how do you do collaboration. What is a good method to do it and how do you set forth operations objectives? The piece in the collaborative advantage, the 2007 piece, articulates to agencies “what is in it for me?” It is one thing to talk about collaboration in terms of the greater good, the regional good, the state good, but really what happens is the agencies that participate in a collaborative effort understand that there is an inherent benefit to them by participating in a collaborative effort. So, the collaborative advantage really begins to articulate “what is in it for me” in terms of what each agency gets, in terms of tangible benefits, out of being part of a collaborative effort.

Finally, the new report, the 2011 report, is a further enhancement of the 2007 report on the regional concept and transportation operations. What that does is we articulate some demonstrations of different organizations around the country. We have attempted to demonstrate the application of a regional concept and this practitioner’s guide is really the articulation, if you will, of practical experience in collaborative effort using the regional concept for transportation operations idea. So, we have an array of tools and techniques and support and we have a number of workshops and technical assistance tools to support anyone who is interested in further enhancing and developing their collaborative effort, regionally or within their agency.

So, today you will hear some good experiences on collaboration and how it has led to the benefits that these folks are going to articulate. With that, I want to again thank you all for joining us and hope that your experience is beneficial and that you see there are ways to enhance your collaborative effort. I hope you also see the importance of it. We are available to support that and provide technical assistance to support you. With that, let me ask Alex to come back on and continue with our program.

Alex BondThanks, Wayne. We appreciate it. We hope everyone takes a look at the planning perforations website. There are great materials on it. Our first speaker, or second speaker, I apologize, is Robert Case from Hampton TPO. If you can join us, we look forward to your presentation.

Robert CaseThank you, Alex. I'm going to talk today about how we have sustained this collaboration that Wayne was talking about and how we sustained it for 20 years now, which I think is pretty amazing. One of the things that we felt is important in sustaining that collaboration is including a lot of stakeholders and of course the right ones, too. Following the ISTEA legislation, you can see that we formed an informal ITS group with the state DOT and we had representatives from FHWA. Wayne has been involved for a long

time and of course from us, the state police, and you can see all these others, such as cities and even universities and transit. In our area, the port authority is very important and the Navy is very important. We included those too along with the state's Transportation Research Council.

Another factor that we think has enabled this 20 year success is that the committee was placed under the MPO structure. I don't know that it has to be MPO structure but it is important to have a structure. You can see that in '95, one of the first things they did was a strategic deployment plan. One of the recommendations of the plan was that this subcommittee be formally established under the MPO structure and so it still is. You can see there on the screen that we have a board of elected officials I work for and under that a technical committee of traffic engineers and city planners and then under that committee, this subcommittee for ITS and operations. It is important because the MPO has established processes for how meetings are done and when they are done and how things are posted to the Internet and how leadership is passed on and other established processes. Of course not the least of which is how many is distributed.

We also have a history of collaboration. I worked for a Planning District Commission and we have environmental folks and homeland security folks so we have this whole history of regional collaboration. Another thing I think is important that explains the success is the flexibility. If you could imagine over 20 years things change. One way we have been flexible is in membership and participation. The official ITS subcommittee had membership similar to the list I showed you and it is important to note the list includes agencies that are not MPO members. Most of them are though and all of them are invited. Some of the people included in operations are not necessarily members of MPO. We have been flexible in that. Also, it is technically a subcommittee of the group of traffic engineers and planners but we have included operation members that are not in the technical committee. We have been flexible in those two ways. I think it's been successful.

Then of course another important aspect is leadership. It occurs to me that you want somebody in leadership who is an implementer of ITS and operations. Initially, the group was led by VDOT, one of the main implementers in this area. I think that was very important. Also, it was led by my predecessor, and although not an implementer of ITS as such, she provided that MPO structure and a passion for ITS and operations which I think is important in continuing.

I think it's important that stuff actually get done, that you implement projects and not just talk about things. They have been able to do that over these years. In the old days, they initiated a roadway information system, sharing road closures with the public and that sort of thing. You can see there, they initiated an advanced travel information system where you share traffic conditions with the public. Of course these things are old hat now but 15/20 years ago that was not necessarily the case. Then, more recently, and Wayne mentioned these RCTO's, we developed one. It was specifically for incident management and that came out of the ITS subcommittee.

Speaking of that, I want to speak for a minute again about membership and participation and who you invite. I think it is important obviously that the people you try to invite are related to the purpose of the group. You can see that in the secondary area there that we added a lot of these first responders

because the people in incident management are the people involved. So, this group, which was born out of the ITS subcommittee, had state police, local police, fire departments and other first responders. So, it is important to know who you are serving. And then in the first bullet there, the RCTO has been led by VDOT. That is important because they are the “boots on the ground,” so to speak.

So, someone like me, who is not out it the field, would find it difficult to lead a group. Now, I mentioned flexibility before and evolution is a part of that. Another way we've been flexible and involved is in focus and leadership. Over 20 years, things change. In 2009, this subcommittee broadened its focus, even changed its name from ITS to Operations. It is now known as the Hampton Roads Transportation Operations Subcommittee. Also, changing the leadership is important. Instead of VDOT and MPO being in official leadership, we are now led by local governments that we serve. We are on our second chair and things are going well. So again, it is important because they are “do-ers” of operations. They are there every day. In fact, we just had a big operations sale event with the tall ships this weekend so my chair of that committee was literally on the ground watching thousands of people.

So, now, our role has shifted a little bit as staff. We are more only in a support role now as opposed to leadership and support. So, I think another important thing is to find out what the group wants, once you get them there. In 2009, we were making this transition, and we surveyed the subcommittee members and asked them “what do you want?” What do you want this group to look like? What should it do? What should its purpose be? They desired to exchange information with each other. They wanted a place to come together and share successes and failures. They also wanted to meet bimonthly. I think that is important in two ways. One, it is consistent so they know we meet on every even month, the second Tuesday. In fact we met this morning. So, they know if it is an even month on the second Tuesday, we will meet. It is not too often and not too infrequent. I think that's been successful.

Another point of flexibility is again the purpose of the subcommittee, and it seemed to me that these are our new purposes so I have written them down and I repeat them until somebody tells me that is not the case. So, I already mentioned the second one, a place to share lessons learned, and the first one, learn about new technologies. We bring people in, public and private, federal, state, etc., telling us about their new technology. Then, the third purpose there is to advise VDOT and the MPO. It is in the MPO structure so they make recommendations to their parent body and the recommendations move on up the line. Also, VDOT has come to us for advice. I will mention it again in a second.

So, another, in this line of I don't know I think I have 13 points, is giving members ownership. We talked about the leadership role, which is currently played by local government, and that is who most of our members are, so that works well. And then, they have ownership because they have had opportunities to present their triumphs. We dedicate a time for people to say “in my city, we have had success with this and that” and then, likewise, we have had these trials asking for help. We need help in this area and somebody else on the committee may have had success in that area. It works very nicely. And then we even give them ownership in hosting. Half the meetings are here, and half are off-site. They get to show off their facilities and that has worked very well.

The recent work of the subcommittee has been in those purposes that I mentioned. We recommended improvements to VDOT's hurricane evacuation plan, and they came to us and asked us to prioritize their ITS projects which I think says a lot. And then, we received input from FHWA. I don't know if you're familiar with their roadway weather information systems. Then, they shared lessons learned from a recent hurricane that we had. They are advising this modeling and simulation center in a study they are doing about cyber risk to control systems.

So, one of the last points I will mention is service and continuity. I view myself as a servant to this group, and so I help them prepare the agendas and transmit the agendas. This usually happens a week in advance pretty much every time. So, they say if you show people you have prepared for them, they will come, and that is what we do. As I said, we host the meetings, we provide them nice things to eat and drink, and it is silly but it makes a difference. Then, we post all our documents to the Internet so everybody can see. The public and then members can see everything going on. Then, I will say a word about continuity. I am not sure how you achieve that, but we had the same MPO leader for the first 17 years of that 20 year period. I am a newcomer to this, but my predecessor was there from the beginning, and you can imagine what that sort of continuity can do as long as the person of course maintains some passion and interest, which she did. I have a helper who has been involved for 13 years and continuity has been very successful.

Of course you have money, which is always important. The MPO has allocated some of its federal funds to projects endorsed by the subcommittee, and you can see some of those there. And of course the MPO have allocated dollars to signal retiming and local traffic operations centers. The state has a big one and most of the cities have one too. Of course VDOT has allocated millions of dollars to its system and that is helpful.

Then, speaking of the service, we provide analyses to these local governments we serve. Here is a list of some in the last four years. We do all of this in-house. They are corridor studies, you're familiar with the CMP, and some area studies. We have this relationship with these people providing them studies that they ask for.

So, I will just recap since my time is up and I think I have 13 lessons learned here. We include a lot of stakeholders. Secondly, it is part of a structure. Thirdly, we have been flexible in all of these areas. Fourthly, we have had leaders that are “do-ers” initially with continuous leadership for 17 years. We've implemented projects, designed our groups, and split them up by purpose-one for operations and one for incident management-to sort of a subset of operations. We have asked them what they want, we have our meetings regularly scheduled, we have given them ownership in the ways I mentioned, we provide rigorous services to them, their projects have been funded, and lastly, we have provided these studies. And so, Alex, that is the end of my presentation.

Alex BondThank you, Robert. I would like to remind all of our participants to enter questions in the chat box. There are quite a few items to discuss once our presenters are finished. Next up from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, we have Bala and Eileen. You can start whenever you are ready.

Eileen SingletonOkay. Hello this is Eileen. I will be starting off and Bala will come in in the middle a little bit. It was interesting hearing what is going on in Hampton Roads. There is a lot I heard that was similar. Of course some things were different and listening to the previous presentation kind of made me think of a subtitle for ours. It would be sustaining regional collaboration on the cheap without much funding. So I will get into that.

Here is a quick overview of the presentation. I will give a brief overview of our region, an overview of our management and operations committees and programs, and summarize our lessons learned and provide a couple of final thoughts. Our region is about the 20th most populous metro area in the country. We are a major employment center and tourist destination, and also adjacent to the national capital region, so that has some implications. Our MPO is the Baltimore Regional Transportation Board.

Now I'm going to just give kind of a quick overview of our major management operations and ITS documents and committees and how they came into being in the last decade or so. We started with the ITS Strategic Deployment Plan which was completed in 1998. That was a culmination of a couple of years of work of our early deployment planning process. In about 1999 and 2000, we initiated the ITS partnership and also the Baltimore Regional Operations Coordination Committee. I will get into more detail about what they were. The ITS partnership really focuses as an oversight group and the B-ROC committee focuses on traffic incident management. A little bit later we added the Traffic Signal Subcommittee. As the term ITS was overcome by management operations, we changed the name of the ITS partnership to the Management and Operations Partnership. We also, a bit later, initiated the Transportation and Public Works Committee, and we did an update to our ITS Strategic Deployment Plan to expand and update it. We call it the Management and Operation Strategic Deployment Plan. That was completed in 2007. Then, most recently, the B-ROC committee changed its name to the Traffic Incident Management for the Baltimore Region to better reflect the focus of the committee.

This shows an overview. The MPO is at the top, the Baltimore Regional Transportation Board, the Management and Operations Partnership underneath, and the three, more focused project committees.

Now I am briefly going to give an overview of our committees. The Management and Operations Partnership was initiated first and that group was a high-level group to identify, champion, and oversee regional M&O projects. We aim to have the public works directors from local jurisdictions as well as state transportation operations managers. We also had a couple of private sector and university representatives. That group submitted annual project recommendations to the MPO for consideration in the TIP; however, we didn't have funding set aside for regional M&O projects. So, we didn't get any regional projects funded in the TIP. The partnership also tried to submit projects to the Long-Range Transportation Plan, and we found that to be difficult as well because of how we structure the projects. They are put into categories: highway, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian, and operations really didn't fit in. So, after about a decade of meeting and facing difficulty and frustration, the group went on hiatus for a few years. We actually had a meeting in March to bring the partnership back together to see how we can use the group to inform the public works directors. It would be a benefit to them as well as to the region. We still don’t have regional operations funding, so we are not sure how that is going to work out.

Our Traffic Incident Management Committee nicknamed TIMBR, meets bimonthly similar to Hampton Roads, and they focus on various aspects of traffic incident management, communication, cooperation and coordination. We received some consultant support from the Maryland State Highway Administration to help us in supporting the committee but we don't have any funding allocated for any large regional projects that may be identified. The focus of our TIM committee is the regional level projects, the ones where there is more coordination needed between jurisdictions between agencies between the state and federal level. These incidents occur every day, not once a year or once in a blue moon.

The member agencies in our TIMBR Committee are definitely a wider range than our MPO committee. We have public works and transportation, police, fire, and emergency management from local and state level. We worked with the Department of Environment from the state level as well as the medical examiner. We have worked with some federal representatives such as the Naval Academy in Annapolis, the Coast Guard, and the US Park Service, which operates part of one of the roads that comes into our region. On the other side, we have consultants as well as us (the Baltimore Metropolitan Council), the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in our neighboring region, and also Towing and Recovery, which is important to include in traffic consideration management. And then there is also the University of Maryland.

This slide provides a good overview of various activities that our TIMBR committee has worked on. I will go into some of the highlights. The next two sides show a summary of each item we have worked on and how well it has been used. For the field guides and forms, we developed a Spanish-language field guide which has been very successful and used in the field. The two other items under field guides are the Incident Management Coordination Field Guide and the Medical Examiner Form. You will need some additional work and coordination. We have been successful in training and awareness. We have held several successful incident management conferences, and we have been able to get federal funding for those. We've developed an online traffic incident management training course which will be posted soon. Also we found that the Federal Highway Traffic Incident Management self-assessment has been a useful way to identify issues we might want to pursue moving forward. We have been doing those regularly, and we have gotten good benefits from those.

We also recently hosted the Federal Highway Advanced Traffic Incident Management Workshop in our region, as they are going around the country. That helped us identify quite a few action items as well. We worked on some plans. Another area that has been pretty successful and also low cost has been topic-specific task forces. We have identified large funeral processions of emergency responders. We have found that there have been quite a few issues related to safety that the vehicles in the procession get into crashes. We were looking at ways to improve the coordination and operation of those activities as well as the escorted motor rides. Apparently there are a lot more requests for police motor escorts of large motorcycle rides. The coordination in that area is difficult and is also a drain on resources as well as an issue with safety. So, we have started working on that issue, trying to develop guidelines and commonality across the region on how those are addressed.

We also worked on an agreement a number of years ago, and the Memorandum of Regional Cooperation was focused on trying to alert anyone on awareness of small road closures. So, not a major road closure that would make all the news channels but something that would be a small road closure that may impact emergency response or something like that. We found that in doing that manual notification, which is how we had to do it, was difficult. Until something like that becomes implemented and fully automated, it is very difficult to implement in that agreement. I'm going to turn it over to Bala, and he will talk about his subcommittee.

Bala AkundiThanks, Eileen. So as Eileen showed in one of her earlier slides, this group came together in 2002 and essentially provides a forum for all of the traffic signal engineers and technicians to come together and work on some common issues such as changing over to LEDs, battery backups, detection systems and things like that. This group is also, over the last 10 years, come together to identify and undertake projects that improve traffic signal coordination across jurisdictional boundaries.

So, this group essentially is made up of representatives from each of the seven jurisdictions in our region. It also includes representatives from the State Highway Administration and from the Federal Highway Administration. In addition, we also have staff from the National Capital Region’s Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments staff. We work with them closely on several initiatives and we also have several consultants who are very active in this group. The committee meets quarterly and we typically have about 15 to 20 attendees at each of the meetings. It is a group I have really enjoyed working with. Eileen formed the group in 2002 and handed it off to me in 2005 and I really enjoy working with the membership. We actually just in the last week or so appointed the fourth chair to this group. We don't have any set time limits but we now have our fourth chair from Baltimore City.

What the group has been able to do in the 10 years or so is that we have held five regional traffic segment forums back to 2004. Over the course of these years, the forums have grown in size and complexity. Our last one was in May 2011 where we had over 120 attendees. It was actually a Federal Highway showcase for adaptive signal control technologies. We received some funding from Federal Highway to bring attendees together. One of the things that has worked really well for us for the forums and the reason why we are able to attract so many attendees is that we offer this free to the public sector. We charge a fee from the private sector attendees. We also had very good interest from the vendors and exhibitors. We have over 10 exhibitors at each of these events, and they like the audience because they can focus their attention and direct their technologies directly at the audience. There is a link to the signal forum on this slide. I'm sure Alex will get this out to all of the attendees.

The Signal Subcommittee has also pursued funding available over the last three to four years or so mainly for adaptive signal control technology projects. The three or four applications that have been submitted to date have received funds totaling approximately $800,000. One project was recently completed in one of our jurisdictions, and the second bullet here shows the benefits derived by the jurisdiction in terms of reduction in overall travel time and delay, which ultimately leads to reduction in emissions and fuel consumption. Back to you, Eileen.

Eileen SingletonOkay. So the last committee to talk about is or Transportation and Public Works Committee, our newest committee. It was initiated in 2006 under the MPO as well as the Urban Area Homeland Security Workgroup. They address day-to-day operational issues as well as emergency operations for public works and transportation. The members include operations representatives from our local and state public works and DOT agencies. The day-to-day operational activities that the Transportation and Public Works Committee has worked on include three half-day operations that focus on various aspects of day-to-day operations. These events have been low cost and they're hosted by a jurisdiction that provides morning refreshments. They were a good way to bring together supervisors to discuss their best practices and how they do different things and what has worked and hasn't worked. We found it has been really helpful because the supervisors from public works agencies don't have a lot of opportunities to get together and talk about what they are doing. Even though we really do not have any funding for day-to-day operational projects, we are able to do these. We held those several years ago and found that the staff has probably turned over since then and new operational concerns have come into play. We are going to be starting up the cycle again.

The Transportation and Public Works Committee also deals with emergency preparedness activities. I am not going to go into all the details, but you can see there are numerous initiatives undertaken and most of the funding has come from the Homeland Security side under the Urban Area Security Initiative Fund. We also have used some of our transportation funding. A lot of the work has focused on evacuation but we have also gotten into to some disaster debris work as well and some training and awareness.

Bala Akundi So, something else we have been involved in in our region is an ITS architecture advisory panel, and the MPO staff are members of the particular group. We meet as needed to review projects for architecture compliance. In the recent times we have mostly done this for transit projects. We have had either cameras or some type of ITS equipment installed on their systems to review them and sign off on them for compliance. There are plans underway to update the statewide architecture and expand the process to include all ITS projects, and we will be a part of that effort as well.

Eileen Singleton Okay. In putting the presentation together, I was thinking about the lessons learned in sustaining our collaboration over the past decade plus. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is that funding is a great way to get people to the table and keep them there. However, in most cases we don't have funding for most of our committees. We have to look to other ways to keep people interested and engaged. So looking at item number 2, one of our lessons learned was to identify issues of interest and best practices we can address without funding or with minimal funding, and preferably in the short term, which is a timeframe of the operations scope. So as I talked about, our TIMBR committee look at funeral positions and escorted motorcycle rides and how those can be improved in the near-term and also maybe doing incident debriefs, which is a quick turnaround thing. Transportation Public Works did the operations forms which were quick, low-cost and provided good value for the attendees.

As Bala mentioned, the signal committee mentioned LEDs, battery backups, and they had vendors and to talk to them trying to find out what is most important to the participants. Another lesson learned is looking for alternative sources of funds. We've used the Homeland Security funds, federal grants, private funds, CMAQ funds or other funding they can be identified. Another lesson we have learned is about the need to raise the awareness of the decision-makers about the importance of operations and specific needs within operations and how the decision-makers’ decisions impact operations. We've made presentations to the MPO, we’ve sent letters to police and fire chiefs and public works directors requesting their support. We have also heard through word of mouth that participation of the various events saying what a benefit it has been. This all helps to provide benefit and support for our program.

Another one is kind of obvious but you should know your stakeholders in your committee members. I have found in committees, if we start talking about projects that are really longer-term projects, you lose the interest of your committee members. Keep that in mind. It sounds obvious, but I think I heard that for Hampton Roads as well. Focus on what the interests of your committee members are. Another item we have learned is responders regularly rotate jobs. They may be in there for a year, a couple years and then they move on. Specifically, in traffic incident management, it is important to reach out to new members to bring them up to date. We've had a couple of instances where there has been a lot of turnover and you sometimes find that you are having the same conversations in committees because the new members don't know what you’ve talked about before. If possible, ask outgoing members to encourage their replacements to participate in the committee if you know they are outgoing. Sometimes they don't show up for a while and you have heard they have retired and moved on.

Another thing I think everyone else talks about is identifying a champion, especially from a local jurisdiction. Sometimes in our region, if a state agency is leading something, the local jurisdictions may be reluctant to jump in. Getting the participation and the leading voice from a local jurisdiction is helpful. Also, if you can get someone at the operations level as well as the management level, it helps as well. Also, we have found that there are benefits from stakeholders meeting each other, discussing common issues especially from emergency response field. It is better for people to meet at a meeting than in the field when they are actually responding to an incident. So holding meetings and knowing who to call when you have an issue has been very helpful. It is another low-cost way of keeping people together.

I have just a couple final thoughts. Through our ITS and M&O committees we have brought a wide variety of stakeholders together. As in Hampton Roads, a much wider variety of agencies are represented then sit on our MPO board, but that is great and good to identify all the people involved and get their voices. Again, even without dedicated funding, we have experienced benefit from collaboration and improved operations just with getting people together and getting people to understand the roles of other agencies. For any more information there is our contact information. Thank you.

Alex BondThank you, Bala and Eileen. Just a reminder, please enter your questions in the chat box. With that, we will move onto Bob Hart from RTC.

Bob HartFirst, I want to go through and talk for a moment about who RTC is. We are a smaller MPO than the other presenters, but even though we are smaller, I want to say the issues are a bit less complex. But the lessons learned and the structure they have talked about is similar and still applies on a smaller scale, I think. We have the Washington State Department of Transportation, C-TRAN which is Clark County Transportation Agency, Clark County itself, the city of Vancouver, and the small cities north and east of Vancouver. Well what is VAST? It is really our partnership of agencies with Vancouver, Clark County, C-TRAN, WSDOT that works together to plan and implement ITS projects and plans to ensure they are integrated and consistent with other ITS projects and with their implementation plan.

In terms of what we do to sustain collaboration, we've worked hard to maintain productive and positive relationships with our partner agencies. We also work to cooperate on fiber and communications infrastructure. This is an activity that has provided mutual benefit for all partners. We are doing the same thing to come up with cooperative agency projects and work to visible successes which are important.

I want to spend a moment on the agreements we have implemented over the years to help us facilitate that. Our first MOU was in 2001 and that helped us establish a good working relationship. We also formalized our collaborative effort to this process by forming a multiagency steering committee that had a defined scope and responsibilities. We continued that in 2004 to expand our membership to include communications and IT staff from the same VAST agencies to include fiber and communications research. We tried to do this for a few years but we found we had to do more to share our communications and fiber assets more effectively. We executed a binding IGA in 2006.

The single Umbrella Agreement was really important because it allows the agencies to share fiber assets they were not using and make it available to others. We overall defined a pool of assets each agency is willing to share and authorized them to sign binding agreements to share specific fiber segment without having to go back to their agencies for approval. These MOUs and agreements created the institutional framework into the policy and technical issues. Although they helped us begin the collaboration, I think showing the benefits of the cooperation is what has helped sustain this issue over time.

This map shows the extent of fiber sharing permits instituted since the idea was executed a few years ago. We have signed 17 so far, between the VAST agencies. Each permit shows the grantor who owns the fiber, the grantee who is using it, and the path they are using as part of that. For our policymakers, we did an analysis of what it would cost for each of the agencies to build these fiber projects on their own. In total, we have saved between 13 and $16 million by sharing available asset with each other instead of undertaking each individual project on their own. Showing this benefit to our board has really helped us demonstrate that the program is working and that the IGA has had concrete and measurable benefits for the region.

In addition to the fiber sharing permits, we also implemented an asset management system shared between WSDOT, Vancouver, and Clark County. All of this is within a shared database, which complemented the fiber permit process by identifying opportunities and facilitating fiber sharing

between agencies. In addition it helped each agency manage their own assets more effectively, and it ends up benefiting not just the region as a whole, but also the individual agencies.

The TSMO plan was the next phase in collaboration between best partners. The ITS and communications is an important foundation for the operations, but we want to take it to the next step. So, we expanded our VAST committee to create a TSMO committee that is not just the ITS and operations staff, but also had a planning staff from the same VAST agencies. With that in mind the board adopted the region's first TSMO plan in June of last year. It established regional goals and policies for TSMO and also created a 10 year Implementation Plan consisting of operational improvement strategies for the region including signal upgrades and integration, communications, data collection and other projects.

The other key thing that has been important for us is working on developing cooperative projects so that all partners can get benefit for that. That has also helped us sustain collaboration over time. We have done several over the years but I want to mention some current ones we have in place, or just completed or are currently underway. We implemented Virtual Transportation Management Centers, which is a partnership between WSDOT, Vancouver, and Clark County. Each agency has a workstation like this with a common interface and software that allows them to easily share data and video with each other and coordinate operations more easily.

Beginning this year, we have a data collection pilot project, which is a partnership on a major East-West facility in East Vancouver, between north and south and east and west there. It will install permanent blue-tooth devices, radar detection, and central signal system upgrades to allow us to track travel times and identify and evaluate origins and destination trip patters from the corridors. We use that for ongoing monitoring of the system, signal coordination, retiming, support planning, and the congestion management process. It will provide round-the-clock corridor performance information that can be used to address traffic signal time incidents and improve corridor operations. We are including a before and after analysis and lessons learned from the project to demonstrate the benefits of operations for our board and policymakers. With this success in place, our goal is to apply this approach to additional quarters in the future.

Another current project is one that builds on the existing portal transportation data archive at Portland State University in Portland. We are working now with PSU and our VAST partners to expand the data archive to add additional freeway data as well as adding city and county arterial data and transportation information onto the data archive to create a multimodal, multiagency partnership that will improve cooperation and planning and operations. We look to have at least part of these improvements in place by the end of this summer.

Funding is always an issue, and we've worked also to take advantage of RTCs TIP funding criteria to create joint funding applications between agencies. A fiber only project, for example, will not compete well in our criteria or for things like CMAQ funds. But if you bundle it with other operational project like signal upgrades or free we management, we can better compete in the region’s TIP criteria. In addition, the city may have a project that by itself is not competitive, but if pooled with another county or state project, it can compete better. This has helped us achieve consensus on projects, priorities, and what is

next. Together, the partners have programmed over $17 million in ITS projects and operations, since starting this approach of pooling resources and projects back in 2001.

Some of the lessons learned I think is similar to what you have heard from other presenters. These are the key things that helped us sustain this collaborative effort over time. One is partnerships, the second is having cooperative projects, and the third is funding. I think having a lead agency is really important. As the MPO, that has been our champion role. I think the MOU's are important because it helps support the first two elements. Staying at the table is also important even if it seems like progress is minimal. Our communications IGA for the permitting I talked about, took about a year-and-a-half to complete from idea to execution. You also need to get agreement on regional needs and priorities.

For cooperative projects, you do need communications foundation, fiber, cameras and so on, but you also need to plan visible projects and successes. These cooperative projects can help do this and also help the partners stay committed to collaboration. They will also help policymakers see the benefit because they are the ones that hold the strings to see what you're doing and also help sell the program. I think committing funding to manage the program is important but also making sure that you not only haves the funding but also have the lead agency with the time and resources to commit to it. You need to continue to identify funding opportunities for projects. For us, the joint funding application I talked about earlier has helped us take advantage of those criteria and make us successful and continuing to get funding for projects as we work forward. That is it for me, so thank you. Here is my contact information as well.

Alex BondThanks, Bob. For our participants, if you have any questions for our presenters, we will start the Q&A period now, so type away over there in the chat window. This first question, here in the chat window, specifically is for Robert but I think we can have everybody address this a little bit. There's actually a question here that says “did the MPO assume the supporting role with its existing staff or did it take on additional staff for operations? So basically, “did MPO staff up to take on operations work in addition to the standard 3C?

Robert CaseI would say no, we didn't. But we had shifted our work from a lot of these traffic studies. That type of thing we've been doing here for years. We still do a little bit of that, but we shifted more to supporting these committees, so in-house people.

Alex BondHow many people are on staff?

Robert CaseI would say about 12 that support the TPO since we are part of a larger agency that has the administration and stuff like that. As far as engineers and planners, we have about 12.

Alex BondOkay. Bala & Eileen, would you like to address this?

Eileen SingletonSure. Our agency overall has just under 40, and when I was hired in 1998, they hired me specifically to takeover that ITS work. There was someone before me that took on that responsibility, and he was retiring. So, I was hired and have been working on that full-time since then. And I guess after I have been here a couple of years, we hired someone else to work with me partly because I was going out on maternity leave, but when I came back we had two people working on ITS operations as well as emergency preparedness. Then, when the other person left, Bala came on. Well Bala was here working on other things, and he transitioned over to operation, so we probably have about 1.5 people doing operations and security.

Alex BondBob? Did you want to address that?

Bob HartOur MPO is smaller. We have about 10 staff for everything we do. We did not get new staff for our ITS operations piece. My work was redirected, so I spent about one third to a half of my time on VAST ITS types of issues. So for us, it has worked well but I think having a dedicated staff is going to be an important piece.

Alex BondOkay. Our second question I think we can expand a little bit, too. It is just a matter of hosting for operations subcommittees. The direct question was, “does the MPO host both HRTO and the subcommittee meetings?” To clarify here, by the Tennessee Division of FHWA, I assume you mean meeting location. Where do the larger meetings take place?

Robert CaseThis is Rob, again. About half of them take place here for the operations committee and half of them at the different cities and their operation centers. We are very fortunate in that we have very nice meeting facilities here that are used almost around the clock by various governments. So, if I can get on the books there, then I can get them for our committees.

Alex BondOkay. It looks like Tennessee has expanded a bit asking us for who develops the agenda. I had written down the question here for everyone to describe a little bit of how your operations committees relate to the MPO board and any technical advisory committee your MPO might have. Who sets the agenda? Is it a bottom-up process? Tell us if the elected officials often participate on the committee meetings. Bala and Eileen, do you have anything on that?

Eileen SingletonIn terms of setting agendas, there is not a lot of coordination with our MPO. We try to brief them periodically if there is something that seems of interest, but in developing the agenda, Bala and I work with the chair of the committee. We will draft an agenda, bring it to the chair, and say “how does this look? Is there anything else or items that have come from previous meetings?” And, one of our challenges is actually trying to get a champion at that decision-maker level. That is one of the reasons we have had trouble getting funding. But, we do a lot, and it the worker level, we do have good

participation and good support. Our committees have a chair from the local jurisdictions and we work closely with them. I guess in terms of where we have our meetings, we have a meeting room here. We try and move it around sometimes just for ease of access and ease of parking. Bala’s subcommittee has have a habit of meeting once a year at a local park in one of the pavilions as kind of a nice change of pace. We move around.

Alex BondWould anyone else like to address that?

Bob HartFor us, RTC sets the agenda for our VAST steering committee, but the group is made up primarily of management staff from those agencies. We really are, based on our MOU, a subcommittee of our Regional Transportation Advisory Committee which we post to our policy Board. We try to keep our policy board abreast of our VAST types of issues at least twice year if not more depending on issues coming up. We try to collaborate and make sure they are up to speed on our activities because we need them to support our program to ensure we get funding.

Alex BondI have a general question as far as continuity. This webinar is about sustaining your committees and operations. Can you describe any turnover on the board? Do you frequently have new groups express interest in participating? How often does that happen? Anyone have anything to add on that one?

Bob HartI will give a quick answer. For our actual steering committee that I meet with every month, we have great continuity. We have been very lucky in the way that most of the people of the agencies have not changed all that much, and they've done a good job transitioning to new staff when that has happened. On our governing board, we have to continually educate them about what we are doing because half of our elected officials are on there, so we are starting fresh every couple of years in that sense.

Alex BondOkay. Please feel free to type in a question here if anyone has one. I have one more left for the whole group again. You mentioned several places working with your neighbors, two of you are on the border with another state. I would like to hear about any special projects you've done with neighboring states. I know you talked about your relationship with Metropolitan Washington, but if you could expand on some of those items, it would be great.

Bob HartI can step in for a moment here. When I talked about my committees, we do have representations periodically from ODOT or Metro when the need comes up. We had a recent project we are working on now to scope it out a bit more, but given our bi-state region we have I-5 and 205 that connect our two regions together with us and Portland. WSDOT and our MPO have been discussing with ODOT and Oregon Metro MPO about having a common bi-state travel time project where we would put signage on freeways for travel times between key interchanges or destinations so users driving through the regions basically has the same message. A person can see the travel time data that covers the entire bi-state

region and that is something that both the DOTs are interested in. We hope to have some funding for that in the next years. So that is our bi-state operational project, ongoing now.

Bala Akundi Regarding the traffic signal forums I talked about, the last couple of forums were actually jointly held with the MPO in the Washington area. What that does is it allows folks from our region to interact with the traffic signal engineers from counties in the Washington Metropolitan area as well. We've been pretty successful in doing that. They subsidize public sector staff from their regions and we do the same with ours. So out of the 100/120 attendees, at least 60/70% are public sector and that roughly means a 50-50 split between Baltimore and Washington regions. So we have been able to work pretty well with them.

Rob CaseI would just add that we are in a different situation than Vancouver and Portland. We are across the border, and it is less developed. So, we have collaborated with North Carolina with hurricane evacuation.

Alex BondSeemed no other questions, I think we can close today's webinar. Just to wrap up, there are a few slides here on the National Transportation Operations Coalition. You can see a list of members here. It has been up for a while, so you probably see a number of organizations you are involved with. I would like to thank all of the organizations for their support over the years. NTOC does have a website that contains information about previous webcasts and also any that might be upcoming. I don't believe we have any scheduled at the present time. The site also contains two discussion forums for operations professionals. One is fairly high-level with strategic issues as the focus, and another is more focused on deployment of ITS and lessons learned by front-line staff. You can sign up on the website to receive the NTOC newsletter. It is distributed biweekly. There is also a number for ITS related events publicized through the NTOC website. Last, you can say this and other webinars recorded at this link here, and we encourage you to share the link with your colleagues so they can take advantage of the material. With that, I would like to thank all of our presenters today. I hope you found this informative, and I hope everybody has a great Tuesday. Thanks.