Broadening Integrated Corridor Management Stakeholders (2020)

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19 Once transportation decisionmakers have determined that the transportation problem is indeed one that is suitable for ICM, they need to set measurable ICM goals and objectives. What Goals Are We Trying to Achieve in Addressing and Mitigating the Identified Problem? The vision of ICM is to achieve significant improvements in the efficient movement of people and goods on transportation networks through aggressive, proactive integration of existing infrastructure along major corridors. By applying an ICM approach, transportation professionals manage the corridor as a multimodal system and make operational decisions for the benefit of the corridor as a whole.6 The broadness, versatility, and complexity of ICM is what makes this approach an effective solution for a wide range of situations. At a basic level, the goals of ICM projects generally involve: • Improving travel time • Increasing corridor throughput • Improving travel time reliability • Improving incident management • Enabling intermodal travel decisions • Increasing safety for all travelers Goals to reduce negative impacts on transportation network performance can include decreasing delay (freeway mainline, ramps, arterials), vehicle hours traveled, peak period duration, emissions, fuel consumption, speed variability, and primary and secondary inci- dents. Goals to maximize benefits for transportation agencies and the traveling public can include increasing capacity, speeds, transit ridership, and transit on-time performance. What Measurable Objectives Should We Set in Order to Determine Whether This Project Is Successful? Performance measures for ICM will typically focus on the following key areas described below. However, customized measures may be selected based on unique impacts of individual mitigation strategies. The key performance areas are as follows: • Mobility – Mobility describes how well people and freight move in the study area. Three primary types of measures are used to quantify mobility, including travel time, delay, and C H A P T E R 3 Establish ICM Objectives & Scale 6 https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop16035/index.htm#intro1.

20 Broadening Integrated Corridor Management Stakeholders throughput. Travel time and delay are fairly straightforward to calculate. Throughput is cal- culated by comparing travel times under the incident scenarios to those under no incident – by comparing the percentage of trips under the same threshold travel time in both the pre- and post-mitigation scenarios, the relative influence of the strategies on reducing extreme travel times can be estimated. • Reliability and Variability of Travel Time – Reliability and variability capture the relative predictability of the public’s travel time. Unlike mobility, which measures how many people are moving at what rate, the reliability/variability measures focus on how mobility varies from day to day. Travel time reliability/variability typically is reported in terms of changes in the Planning Index and changes in the standard deviation of travel time. • Transportation Safety – Transportation safety is another performance area that may be of interest to transportation analysis. Safety typically is measured in terms of accidents or crashes in the study area, including fatalities, injuries, and property-damage-only accidents. Avail- able safety analysis and prediction methods are not sensitive to transportation improvement strategies. At best, available safety analysis methods rely on crude measures such as volume- to-capacity ratio (V/C) or rely on empirical comparison methods such as identifying safety benefits resulting from the implementation of a certain type of mitigation strategy and then applying the same expected improvement rate to a future implementation of the same or similar strategy. Clearly, this is an area deserving new research. • Emissions and Fuel Consumption – Emissions and fuel consumption rates are used to pro- duce estimates based on variables such as facility type, vehicle mix, and travel speed. • Benefit-Cost – Benefits should be estimated for the improvements by monetizing the incre- mental change in performance measures associated with the ICM strategies and scenarios analyzed. The incremental change in the performance measure should reflect the weighted sum of changes for all analysis scenarios. To estimate the benefits in annual dollar values, the annual incremental change in the various performance measures should be multiplied with an estimate of the monetary value of benefits (e.g., the value of an hour of travel time saved). Monetary values of benefits (e.g., value of time, value of accident reduction) should be con- sistent with those values typically applied in the region. For those performance measures with no established local value, national benefit valuations may be applied. Planning-level cost estimates include lifecycle costs, including capital, operating, and maintenance costs. Costs are typically expressed in terms of the net present value of various components. Annualized costs represent the average annual expenditure that is expected in order to deploy, operate, and maintain the transportation improvement and replace equipment items as they reach the end of their useful life. What Are Some Tiered ICM Implementation Options if We Don’t Have the Budget to Build a Full-Scale ICM System? Smaller scale agencies may not have the resources or capability maturity to implement full- scale ICM projects. NCHRP’s Advances in Strategies for Implementing Integrated Corridor Management report7 lists the following basic building blocks of ICM. If it is not feasible to achieve full automation right away, consider a tiered implementation approach that supports incremental growth. Possible approaches follow each bullet point. 7 National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Advances in Strategies for Implementing Integrated Corridor Management (ICM), NCHRP Project 20-68A, Scan 12-02. Available at: http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/nchrp/docs/NCHRP20- 68A_12-02.pdf.

Establish ICM Objectives & Scale 21 • Exchange of Data – There must be an exchange of data between agencies responding to an event with the managed corridor. This could be as simple as telephone calls discussing and agreeing to a response; this would be the minimum. For data exchange to be effective, the scan team recommends an automated data sharing system. Because these systems may vary among agencies responding to events, a standards-based system (e.g., center-to-center communica- tion, National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol, Traffic Management Data Dictionary, Message Sets for External Traffic Management Center to Traffic Management Center Communication, or transit communications interface profiles) should be used for more seamless integration. • Institutional Cooperation – There must be open communication and cooperation among agencies to operate the assets within the corridor. This can be done informally (i.e., opera- tional personnel sharing information and coordinating responses among agencies) or more formally (i.e., through intergovernmental agreements or memorandums of understanding [MOUs] that define roles and responsibilities). Some areas have been successful using high- level ITS cooperative MOUs, while others have developed ICM-specific MOUs. • Coordinated Response – For ICM to work properly, all agencies involved with the corridor’s operations must coordinate their response to events. An agency that does not coordinate its response could negatively affect the corridor. Once the ICM program is in place and opera- tional, it is time to test, update, and validate the response plans used by the corridor. • Available Capacity – There must be available capacity within the transportation to manage a corridor through a multi-agency or intermodal ICM approach. If a freeway is congested, there must be capacity on an alternate freeway, the adjacent arterial network, or transit servicing the corridor for ICM to be considered.

22 Broadening Integrated Corridor Management Stakeholders • Traveler Information – Providing timely notifications to the public about traffic conditions allows travelers to plan accordingly. A system that supports automated notifications (e.g., congestion, incidents, and strategies for minimizing delay) among operating agencies as well as the traveling public allows for more proactive traffic management and emergency routing during recurrent and non-recurrent congestion.