On Relieving Highway Congestion Through Capacity Enhancements and Increased Efficiency
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Presented by
Richard L. Ruddell
Vice Chair for Government Affairs
American Public Transportation Association
1666 K Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 496-4800
APTA is a nonprofit international association of over 1,400 public and private member organizations including transit systems and commuter rail operators; 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.
Introduction
Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to testify on this
important issue. My name is Richard L. Ruddell. I am the General Manager of the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority and APTA's Vice Chair for Government Affairs.
APTA shares an appreciation of the role that improved operations of
metropolitan transportation systems can play in improving the performance of existing
transportation infrastructure. We strongly support the concept of a balanced
transportation system that offers Americans options or choices in their daily mobility
needs, and we are very supportive of efforts to make our transportation more efficient and
productive.
APTA believes that public transportation is an integral part of every
community’s surface transportation system, and that greater utilization of public
transportation services and facilities can help relieve congestion. In that vein, APTA is
extremely interested in addressing issues related to traffic congestion. In fact, APTA has
worked closely with other transportation groups that represent both highway and transit
interests, and we support a level of federal investment in the entire surface
transportation infrastructure that adequately addresses identifiable needs. APTA firmly
believes that a good transportation system is one of the critical underpinnings of a
healthy, growing economy – an important issue as we begin to address reauthorization
of the transit and highway programs next year.
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.
As FHWA has noted, the movement of people, goods, and vehicles on the nation’s
surface transportation system is now critically dependent on how effectively that system
is managed and operated. The National 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,
which include:
- the need for greater coordination at the planning stage;
- the need for increased emphasis and investment in shared information technologies and
other intelligent transportation systems at the system and corridor level to support
customer transit decisions and choices; and
- recognition 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
and 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", 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 the overall transportation system in a complex urbanized area
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
There are two particular factors that will be instrumental in defining
the operations mission in this matter. 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 affected 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 narrow 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 affects 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 may be 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 other modal operators, begin to see and
understand the interdependencies, change is more likely to occur.
Key Definitional Issues
The operations and management mission must be defined broadly enough to
cover a full range of functions to 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, for example,
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 be based on well-documented
customer-related expectations and experiences; and 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 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 a way to shift 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 focus of the Subcommittee on Highways and
Transit's hearing today and its recognition of the importance of intermodalism in
addressing highway congestion and efficiency issues. There are many areas where transit is
already working with its partners to improve the overall management and operation of the
transportation system, and we look forward to increased efforts in that regard. We would
be pleased to provide any additional information the Committee may wish to review.
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