SUBCOMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION, INFRASTRUCTURE AND NUCLEAR SAFETY
COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS
*******
American Public Transportation Association
1666 K Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 496-4800
APTA is a nonprofit international association of over 1,400 member organizations including transit systems; planning, design, construction and finance firms; product and service providers; academic institutions; transit associations and state departments of transportation. APTA members serve the public interest by providing safe, efficient and economical transit services and products. Over ninety percent of persons using public transportation in the United States and Canada are served by APTA members.
Overview and Background
Thank you for the opportunity to submit these comments for the record
in the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on Transportation,
Infrastructure and Nuclear Safety’s Symposium on Metropolitan Operations and
Security. APTA shares an appreciation of the role that improved operations of metropolitan
transportation systems can play in improving the performance of existing transportation
infrastructure.
Over the past two and a half years APTA and a broad range of
stakeholders have participated in the Federal Highway Administration’s National
Dialogue on Transportation Operations. This initiative has helped bring to focus the
importance of operations and management of transportation systems at the regional level.
FHWA has defined operations as "optimizing the performance of the existing systems to
meet or exceed varying customer expectations under varying conditions." The dialogue
has been fueled by problems in the nation’s transportation system, including
increased concerns over congestion and public safety.
APTA has held several workshops and focus groups with public
transportation systems from around the country to identify their issues and concerns. We
found such issues to include:
- greater coordination at the planning stage;
- increased emphasis and investment in shared information technologies and other
intelligent transportation systems at the system and corridor level in order to support
customer transit decisions and choices; and
- acknowledgement that similar congestion and system performance issues exist in transit
systems as exist in highways and other modes.
Transit professionals have routinely shouldered a comprehensive
responsibility for management and operations of transit systems and services in addition
to responsibility for capital construction and asset maintenance. With this base of
experience, industry members welcome the opportunity to broaden the discussion of
management and operations beyond the concerns of individual modes and beyond the bounds of
implementing agencies in an effort to better address and respond to the travel needs and
experiences of customers.
Transit Agencies as Operators and Managers: A Long Tradition
Transit agencies, particularly regional transit authorities, have
traditionally exercised a broad-ranging "operations" mission and responsibility.
Transit agencies, more than any surface transportation entity, are in many ways emerging
as ‘mobility managers’ or ‘operations managers’.
Transit operators have learned from experience that while operational
issues are often given the most play in the context of addressing a "real time
event", that the best solutions are those which are developed in advance, as part of
a coherent, system-wide planning and operations context. The capabilities and capacity
necessary to operate across this breadth may provide a potential base from which to manage
system operations on a multi-modal basis, particularly in larger urban areas with
sophisticated multi-modal transit services. Yet transit agencies rarely have been called
on to play a significant, sustained role with sister implementing or planning agencies on
other than project-specific exercises.
Concepts in an Operations Framework
As highlighted above, the context for examining management and
operations has a number of characteristics. We feel that there are two particular factors
that will be instrumental in defining the operations mission in the continuing dialogue.
First, transit operators have always been sensitive to issues arising out of concern for
system operations because transit motorized vehicles utilize the roadway system and are
negatively impacted when there are physical and operational problems with or on the
roadway resulting in unacceptable levels of congestion and delay. If operational and
management solutions are broadly defined, transit can play a significant role in reducing
these problems in many instances. To the extent that owners/managers of the highway
network take a myopic view of management and operations, however, sustained improvements
in the travel experience are less likely to be achieved and customers will continue to
suffer.
Second, as the focus shifts to the management and operations of a
system, single purpose agencies can no longer afford to be insular in the way they look at
or define the problem, since the problem definition ultimately impacts the range of
solutions to be considered.
There are several broad concepts that must be recognized and supported
in defining a national operations framework:
- There is a fundamental interdependence between transportation services and facilities;
- There is a similar interdependence between the supply of and demand for transportation;
- Current policies, programs and institutional arrangements do not reflect or support
these interdependencies;
- These interdependencies call for greater collaboration and integration across several
dimensions…
…across modes…
…among services and facilities…
…across key functions…
…across organizations and institutions…
…across programs and policies…
- The measure of success lies as much, if not more, in the quality of the customer
experience, than in independently maximizing the use of separate transportation assets;
- The question of who should be responsible (or how to share responsibility) for the
quality of the customer’s travel experience is at least as important as enlarging the
flow of funds to specific infrastructure improvements.
The core idea behind these broad concepts is that no mode can afford to
be insular in its planning, decision-making, implementation or management. By defining the
dialogue in such a way that transit, as well as the other players, begins to see and
understand the interdependencies, change is more likely to occur. These broad concepts are
reflected in our discussion of key issues, principles and action steps below.
Key Definitional Issues
The operations and management mission must be defined broadly enough to
cover a full range of functions that would ideally be coordinated. However, the mission
should not be defined so broadly that individual communities and agencies will be
discouraged from approaching the problems on a practical or applied basis. Communities
have effectively begun to coordinate activities and functions among multiple agencies,
e.g. customer information sharing, resulting in solutions such as implementation of
regional versions of the 511 national traveler information number and jointly operated
traffic control and transit operations centers. While these initial steps may not solve
the whole problem, they reflect progress that should not be discouraged.
In order to advance the operations dialogue, there must be some basic
agreement. APTA believes that the following basic concepts are key to defining the
problem:
- The scope of management and operations responsibilities should be multi-modal, network
wide geographically, and multi-jurisdictional, with responses based on coordination of
various functions on appropriate portions of the network.
- Management and operations should incorporate overt consideration of conditions and
actions that influence travel demand as well as the supply of service and capacity.
Related actors and stakeholders should be involved at all levels of decision-making. Land
use and development professionals and community building decision-makers that shape demand
for services should help decide what strategies/investments are needed to manage and
operate an integrated transportation system. Management of the system can only be
effective if it is about the whole mobility experience rather than about what’s
happening between right-of-way lines.
- Performance monitoring and measurement should: (a) be based on well-documented
customer-related expectations and experiences; and (b) be focused on outcomes of
activities, not only facility or agency outputs.
Institutional Roles and Responsibilities
Management and operations responsibility is currently being assumed or
assigned through a variety of partial or piecemeal arrangements around the country. There
has been no assessment of why certain arrangements evolved or how successful they are in
relation to what was intended or could have been achieved. Nonetheless, history alone
supports the sense that it is not necessary, nor necessarily a precondition for success,
that a single type of agency or a single institution be assigned independent,
comprehensive responsibility for management and operations. It is highly unlikely that a
massive restructuring of our transportation institutions would be desired or accepted.
As long as there continue to be modal agencies, institutional
coordination will have to be based largely on voluntary cooperation, enlightened
self-interest and programmatic incentives. Changes in institutional arrangements should
evolve to suit the governance philosophies of individual areas. However, the traditional
scope of responsibilities, and the range of skills and capacity of various implementing
agencies should be recognized and differentiated in the evolution of new institutional
arrangements. Transit agencies in many areas may be the farthest evolved institutions in
terms of skills and capacity for multi-modal network or systems management and operations
in a metropolitan context.
Initial Targets for Multi-modal System Management and Operations Initiatives: Activities, Functions, and Investments
Each of the following activities, functions or investments might be a
logical focus for priority attention in an operations and management initiative:
- Coordination at the planning stage to ensure that system integration is factored
into the assessment of needs and the definition of solutions. Starting at this stage is
also an effective way to begin the process of establishing relationships among diverse
agencies. These relationships mature as projects advance through implementation and
continued operation. Early coordination brings the whole operations and management
dialogue up front, where there is still time to make changes. The operations planning
function should focus on corridors (rather than facilities) to insure the broadest range
of strategies and actions are considered, and that all appropriate trade-offs are analyzed
and understood.
The MPO process should include evaluation criteria that measure the
benefit to the entire system from a project, rather than focus on the attributes of the
individual project. Since state, county and municipal transportation projects are often
planned as mutually exclusive investments, the MPO should analyze or provide guidance when
projects may overlap or impede the work of others in progress.
- Interfaces among modes and systems to assure that adequate and appropriate
interchange, choice and safety are available. Activity at the design level deserves
attention. Design standards for traditional street/highway planning should accommodate
transit operating needs – curb designs, signal prioritization, enforcement of bus
lanes and bus stops – not merely focus on auto use and movement. "Context
Sensitive Design" processes are an example of focusing many stakeholders on
interfaces to assure the preservation of effective pedestrian access and transit vehicle
operating conditions as on-street improvements are considered in support of both existing
or planned development.
- Increased emphasis and investment in shared information technologies at the system and
corridor level should be a priority to better support customer travel decisions and
choice, and to build a capability to continuously monitor system performance in
customer-related terms. Development of these technologies has to begin with this
multi-user focus in order to reduce downstream costs and increase productivity. From a
transit perspective this principle would support larger investments in GIS/AVL and real
time customer information deployments.
- Integrated fare/toll/revenue/pricing systems to add convenience for customers,
encourage consideration of the widest array of travel choices and providers, and to
provide capability to rationalize pricing across the network to meet varied objectives.
This principle would support larger investment in transit smart-card-type technologies.
- Alternative solutions for corridors experiencing the most significant congestion/delay
problems (both recurrent and non-recurrent congestion) to ease capacity constraints,
and to provide appropriate options, choices and redundancy on the system. The addition of
significant new transit capacity may be a central operations and management strategy in
many congested corridors.
- Data-sharing to allow consistent system-wide monitoring and analysis that would
provide an entre to move away from vehicle-related measures to passenger-related
measures.
- Financial incentives for project level or sustained multi-modal
collaboration/integration to spur greater responses from implementing agencies and
greater involvement of other stakeholders.
Conclusion
APTA appreciates the efforts of the Committee on Environment and Public
Works to provide this opportunity to identify the issues on metropolitan operation and
thus start shaping the solutions. There are many areas where transit is already working
with its partners to improve the overall management and operation of the system. It is our
hope that we will be able to establish a process, as a result of this dialogue, to
increase the opportunities for and actual occurrence of increased coordination. We would
be pleased to provide any additional information the Committee may wish to review.
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