The Congestion Management Process

What is a CMP?

A CMP is a systematic process for managing congestion that provides information on transportation system performance. It recommends a range of strategies to minimize congestion and enhance the mobility of people and goods. These multimodal strategies include, but are not limited to, operational improvements, travel demand management, policy approaches, and additions to capacity. The CMP advances the goals of the DVRPC Long Range Plan and strengthens the connection between the Plan and the Transportation Improvement Program (TIP).

The CMP, as included in current federal transportation regulations, enhances the existing concept of a Congestion Management System (CMS) with emphasis on being an ongoing cycle and other refinements. It identifies congested corridors and multimodal strategies to mitigate the congestion. Where more single-occupancy vehicle capacity is appropriate, the CMP includes supplemental strategies to reduce travel demand and get the most value from the investment. It completes its cycle evaluating the effectiveness of transportation improvements, coordinating with other planning processes, and providing updated analysis of the performance of the transportation system as it goes back around.

How Does the CMP Help the Delaware Valley

The CMP improves connections in transportation planning that will help with transportation connections in the real world. The benefits of an ongoing CMP include:

• More focused use of limited federal transportation funds where they can do the most to help the region meet its goals
• Enhanced use of each mode of transportation for what it does well, improved connections among modes, and between transportation, land use, economic development, and environmental planning
• Encouragement for a wide range of stakeholders to participate and coordinate. The advantages include data, guidance on helping projects conform to the CMP, priority for conforming projects in the TIP and LRP update processes, help keeping track of progress, and opportunity for stakeholders' studies to be more widely used.
• A program for regular monitoring and evaluation of system performance
• Technical resources useful for a range of projects, such as ongoing analysis of the effectiveness of strategies
• CMP is required by federal regulation

Planning & the CMP Advisory Committee

A CMP update starts with key stakeholders discussing ideas and coming to agreement.

The CMP Advisory Committee includes representatives of:

• Each of the nine DVRPC counties
• Pennsylvania and New Jersey departments of transportation and transit authorities
• Federal partner agencies (Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration)
• DVRPC Regional Citizens Committee and Good Movement Task Force
• Transportation management associations
• Others

In addition, there are interdepartmental team meetings of DVRPC staff and consultation with adjacent metropolitan planning organizations. Initially, this effort results in a methodology and technical memorandum on policy issues. The Committee was and remains an active, productive, and integral part of CMP.

Evaluation

To be effective, the CMP needs to evaluate what is working well in terms of minimizing congestion and, also, how to improve for the next cycle of the process. This involves:

• Agree on how to measure change in congestion and ability of people and goods to get where they need to go, and then apply these measures. This ties into the regional indicators project.
• Track that supplemental projects continue to move forward in a reasonable manner with their "parent" project, the one that adds single-occupancy vehicle capacity
• Learn from the cycle of the CMP to do the next cycle better
• Coordinate with and participate in various studies and projects and then feed results back into the CMP to enhance future efforts
• Regularly update the CMP and keep it timed to feed into updates of the Long Range Plan.

Analysis

The CMP is region-wide. It uses the following approach:

• Agree on criteria to evaluate congestion and meet the goals of the CMP.
• Identify congested corridors and segment them into subcorridors within which similar transportation strategies seem to be appropriate at a regional planning level. This effort results in a focused set of appropriate strategies for each subcorridor.
• Sketch corridors that seem likely to become congested in the future or that are not currently congested but serve key regional roles
• Agree on procedures such as for federally funded capacityadding road projects not in corridors. Such projects may be appropriate but start with a higher burden of proof than ones in congested corridors, given the limits on funding. Projects that add single-occupancy vehicle capacity must include beneficial supplemental strategies to protect the investment that must be funded at the same time as the main project.

Action

The CMP Report contains implementation tables for DVRPC and for stakeholders. They include:

• Communicate the CMP to various levels of stakeholders and help people use it
• Settle into strengthened regular coordination within DVRPC, including the more closely connected Long Range Plan, CMP, corridor studies, and TIP
• Address the most congested subcorridors through corridor studies leading to projects (coordinated with other management systems), advancing existing proposed projects, and in other ways
• Review TIP projects that would add single-occupancy vehicle capacity and work with project sponsors to produce projects that best serve regional goals