As Greater Philadelphia's Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), DVRPC is federally mandated to produce a Long-Range Plan and a Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) to ensure the orderly growth and development of the region in concert with multiple planning partners. These products work together to form a unified financial plan to fund transportation infrastructure. DVRPC uses performance-based planning to ensure efficient use of the region’s natural resources, public funding, and other assets, and employs a continuing, comprehensive, and cooperative transportation planning, programming, and decision-making process.
Long-Range Plan
The Long-Range Plan (Plan) serves as a blueprint for prioritizing funding for capital transportation investment in the region over a minimum 20-year horizon. Recognizing the integrated and holistic relationship between transportation and the built environment, the Plan also considers land use, the environment, economic development, equity, and quality of life issues, and offers comprehensive policy guidance for the region. The Plan outlines the vision, goals, and strategies established for the region as part of the update process, and contains a fiscally constrained financial plan for funding transportation infrastructure. In close collaboration with its planning partners, DVRPC updates the Plan every four years.
Transportation Improvement Program
The Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) is the regionally agreed upon list of priority transportation projects over a four-year period, as required by federal law. The TIP document contains a multimodal list of all projects that intend to use federal funds, along with all non-federally funded projects that are regionally significant, with estimated costs and schedules. For planning purposes, the DVRPC TIP shows a full 10 years of funding in New Jersey and 12 years in Pennsylvania for highway and public transit projects.
TIP-Plan Project Evaluation Criteria
Not all transportation needs can be addressed with the limited funding the region receives. DVRPC developed a multi-modal, performance-based evaluation process to prioritize projects for funding. The TIP-Plan Project Evaluation Criteria is a data-informed support tool used in this process. It is designed to highlight trade-offs that could occur as a result of a given investment or set of investments, facilitate analysis of how new candidate projects align with the vision and goals of the Plan, and help to identify whether and how each candidate project will move the region toward achieving its stated Transportation Performance Measures.