Institute of Transportation Engineers Spring Conference

2001 Spring Conference & Exhibit

Monterey, CA

March 25, 2001

Dr. Christine Johnson

Director, Joint Program Office

Program Manager Operations

Federal Highway Administration

A year ago we launched the Operations Dialogue and today, I would like
to report on the progress.

In this last year we have seen:

-   Congestion just about reaches the boiling point. Rep. Donald Young
    who has recently taken over as chairman of the House Transportation
    & Infrastructure Committee recently said

    -   "Congestion is the No. 1 priority in this country"

    -   In another example AAA reports that Washington, DC area drivers
        say that aggressive driving (49%) and the congestion (28%) that
        encourages it are the two greatest threats to their highway
        safety. The poll marks the first time that congestion has
        exceeded drunk driving as a threat to motorists.

-   We have also seen palpable demand by citizens for more information
    about their trips

    -   In recent snowstorms in Washington, D. C., Virginia, Maryland
        Smart Traveler web sites essentially blew up because so many
        people were trying to access them.

In this last year we have learned more about the dimensions of this
phenomenon we call congestion -- some of which I would like to share
with you.

We need to have a better understanding of "what we want" and "what would
we define as success" -- to (have customers) say that we are doing the
best that can be done in operating the system, efficiently, safely, and
most importantly in a way that helps users "cope" with the crowding and
variability of the system.

Finally, we have begun to think about policy and legislative options.

I'd like to share a little bit of the progress that we have made in each
of these areas.

The Numbers behind Congestion

Let's begin by putting some numbers to the various aspects of
congestion---starting with what the traffic reporters call "normal
congestion". Perhaps the most telling set of numbers I've seen is growth
of travel:

> From 1980 to 1998, vehicle miles traveled increased 72 percent while
> miles of public roads increased only 1 percent.
>
> Another way of looking at it the number of vehicle miles traveled for
> each mile of road increase 70 percent between 1990 and 1998 for all
> roads while the amount of the increase on Interstate Highways was 88
> percent.
>
> As a result:

-   46 percent of peak period travel and 29 percent of urban Interstates
    were congested in 1999.

-   Americans to spend 4.3.billion hours a year stuck in traffic.

-   And this is no longer a phenomenon of the big city. The largest
    increase in travel time delay in the last 15 years (between 1982
    and 1997) occurred in small urban areas, with 400 percent growth.

Given rising volume/density -- any "varying condition" will have
[increasingly]{.underline} disproportionate effects on the system.
Everyday -- work zones, weather, crashes, special events and other
planned and unplanned events consume precious time, capacity, and
economic productivity and, most importantly of all, lives.

In some senses operations is about taking back the road from these
"varying conditions"

We have begun to take a systematic look at each of the elements that are
consuming capacity on our system -- we found that we didn't have a very
good handle on the enemy.

Incidents

Lets start with incidents. From research that was conducted 10 years ago
we know that incidents may consume as much as 60 percent of our peak
hour capacity. The same research estimated that for every minute that it
takes to clear a scene it takes 4 minutes to clear the traffic.

How valid are those numbers today? Are the number of incidents
increasing -- or simply their effects. Right now we don't know.

Equally important is what the stove piping in public safety
communications is costing us in terms of sending the wrong equipment to
the wrong side of a freeway or activating too much medical response --
or worse, too little.

If we are going to seriously tackle "taking back" the road and acquire
the resources that it is going to take we need to know [all]{.underline}
the dimensions of the problem -- in as quantitative terms as possible.

Work Zones

Work zones have moved to near the top of American's frustration list!
When we ask Americans what they thought would be the most effective
solutions to improving transportation in their community -- their top
three answers had to do with relieving the effects of work zones --
essentially getting in, getting out, and STAYING OUT. Number 4 was
better response to highway incidents, Number 5 was timing signals; it
wasn't until Number 6 that they talked about widening roads.

TEA-21 added 40 percent more federal funding into state and local
transportation agencies. Relatively little of it will go into pristine
new roadways -- virtually all of it will involve construction under
traffic conditions! California estimates that 1 in every 5 miles of
state roadways will be under construction at any given time.

The cost of this maintenance of the system -- is not the MONEY! It is
the productivity and time that it saps from the system -- as well as
injuries and fatalities!

We've got to find a better way of maintaining the capacity of the system
under these conditions! We cannot afford not to.

Weather

Weather is perhaps the most frequent "unplanned" bandit of capacity of
our system. Lets put some numbers to this robber.

50 percent of the U.S. population has a 5 percent or greater chance of
being affected by a hurricane; 69 percent of the population lives in
areas experiencing more than 5 inches of snowfall every year.

74 percent of the National Highway System is in the Snow Belt.

A one day highway shutdown due to snow costs a metropolitan area between
\$15 and \$93 million in lost wages, retail sales and taxes.

These are some of the dimensions of just three of the many "variables"
that rob capacity everyday from an already over taxed system. Clearly if
we are ever to effectively "take the road back" we are going have to
know much more.

But lets move on to the progress we have made in understanding what it
is going to take to achieve "Peak Operating Performance".

Feed back at workshops of the Steering Committee for the National
Dialogue can be summarized into 6 elements:

1.  Raise the bar of our performance -- in incident management, special
    event management, disaster response and evacuation, work zone
    management, and traveler information;

2.  Have integrated operations planning, execution, and accountability;

3.  Have the tools and data necessary to drive increasingly better
    decisions;

4.  Have an ability to measure performance;

5.  And communicate that performance to the customer;

6.  Finally -- there needs to be the level of resources that it really
    takes to operate a system as though your political life depended on
    it.

If that is what we are shooting for, lets look at some of the progress
that we've made in each of these categories

Beginning with raising the state of several of the operational practices
closer to the state of the art.

-   [Operations Self-Assessment]{.underline} This last year we completed
    and vetted among representatives of some 40 cities a self assessment
    tool that will help an agency calibrate just how well they are doing
    in operating their system. We plan make it available toward the end
    of the year and begin a campaign among states and cities to use it.

-   [Signal Timing Video]{.underline} \-- because we are aware that
    signal coordination is among the most cost effective activities a
    community can do to improve traffic flow we are creating a video
    aimed at senior elected and appointed officials to raise awareness.
    Copies of the initial version should be available mid summer.

-   [Incident Management]{.underline} On the incident management front
    we have:

    -   issued an updated guidance manual,

    -   and will be sponsoring with AASHTO and ITSA an Incident
        Management Conference in the fall.

-   But the big news is the Public Safety Initiative where the public
    safety community is taking the initiative in developing guidance on
    handling traffic incidents that stress the importance of time to
    clearance and presents a number of techniques.

    -   We will be conducting a number of operational tests with the
        enforcement community testing technology and techniques for
        reducing the response time.

-   [Work Zones]{.underline} In the work zone arena we are zeroing in on
    what might be called a "Work Zone Hassle Measure" that in simplest
    form divides the delay by the expected life of the improvement and
    then puts the result on a "Hassle Scale" of 1 to 10 that will allow
    a transportation commissioner to talk to the public about the repair
    would rate about a 6 on the hassle scale but we have changed the
    construction approach, and the way we are handling traffic so that
    it now ranks a 5.

> We believe that the wide spread use of something as simple as this may
> drive the use of more customer friendly construction methods and
> longer lived pavements.
>
> [Weather]{.underline} In the weather arena we are launching an
> initiative to integrate weather conditions into our traffic signal
> timing patterns to help motorists during storms and keep traffic
> moving as efficiently as possible.

[Integration]{.underline}

There is more we could discuss. I think we all know that in virtually
every aspect of operations -- whether it be access management, demand
management, weather response or signing and signaling there is more,
sometimes much more we could do in doing the best job that can be done.
But that is not enough. The next step is bringing each of those
"instruments" of weather response, signing, signaling, incident response
and make them part of a "symphony" that is played every day.

Peak performance requires integrated operations planning, execution, and
perhaps most importantly, accountability. A clear point of
accountability for the performance of that symphony -- today.

That is a tall order in an industry that is fragmented, project driven
with no single agency in charge! But I believe that we are taking the
beginning steps in this evolution.

-   [Architecture]{.underline}. On April 8 the National ITS Architecture
    Rule became effective -- requiring each region using federal funds
    for any equipment covered in the 31 ITS user services to have a
    regional architecture in place within four years. We believe that
    this requirement will do for operations what the old 20 year long
    range plan did for capital planning.

> It will bring the operating players around the table for a very
> serious long range discussion about:
>
> how they each operate;
>
> how they operate together;
>
> and what information they will use to integrate their operations.

-   [511]{.underline} At the other end of the spectrum, there is now an
    initiative underway to put virtually citizen in the United States
    one telephone call away from their city or state's traveler
    information - simply by dialing 511.

It's a scary thought. But customers are demanding information to at
least help them cope with a crowded and sometimes unreliable system. --
More information than is available currently on radio or television.

AASHTO, ITSA, and APTA are leading a coalition to work out the numerous
issues associated with making this service a reality. The question we
all need to be asking ourselves -- when it becomes a reality, will we
have the information?

Tools

Planning tools are being developed to support the capital planning
process, there also needs to be a rich suite of tools to support both
operations planning, as well as decision support for real time
operations. Good progress has been made in launching the development of
some of these tools in the last 18 months. Some of them include:

-   [Turbo Architecture:]{.underline} will help develop regional
    architectures.

-   [IDAS:]{.underline} a cost benefit modeling tool that will help
    estimate the benefits of a variety of ITS investments.

-   [Quick Zone:]{.underline} which helps balance user "hassle" in a
    work zone against various construction and traffic management
    strategies.

Many of you will be glad to hear that we have made a commitment to
develop, *[in partnership with the private sector]{.underline}*, a New
Generation Simulation Tool or NGSIM -- essentially to replace CorSIM.

We have also launched the development of several decision support tools
to support operations:

-   In a variety of weather conditions,

-   During evacuation,

-   And in the management of work zones.

Measures

Once we array all the symphony instruments, make our plans, have all the
decision support tools in place -- we need to have a clear idea of what
is it we are trying to accomplish \-- and a way to measure how effective
we were \-- a measure that is meaningful to the people we serve. Not
unlike the temperature humidity index. Again I believe we have made
important strides this year.

This year we experimented with 10 cities that had sufficient ITS
instrumentation to get continuous data for a full year.

From that we have tentatively developed three reliability measures that
essentially communicate how frequently the traveler is going to be late
because of system unreliability.

Communicating to the customer

I think we are learning in no uncertain terms that a key -- and possibly
an Achilles heel---to effective operations of our surface transportation
system, will be communicating with the user the accurate information
they need, when they want it. We are also learning that the time that
the customer most wants information -- at the peak of an incident, may
be when the public sector is least able to provide information.

Since I've already talked about 511 let me move on to the final element.

Money

Are we going to spend the money it really takes to operate the system --
or will it always be a stepchild? Budgeted at the margins after
Maintenance and Capital Spending.

-   We have also begun to benchmark, but found that there is very little
    data available. Using a very conservative definition of operations,
    we have found that state expenditures for operations have remained
    fairly flat between l985 and l997 -- growing only from about 5.1
    percent of their budgets to 5.8 percent.

-   By contrast, local spending has grown from 3.4 percent to 6.8
    percent over the same years.

-   And we are in the process of carrying out both a national survey and
    a series of focused interviews addressing the question of "How well
    does operations compete in the budget process?". Is it really a
    stepchild?

That is a good bridge in to look at where we go from here.

[First]{.underline} - more of the same! More raising the state of the
practice, more integration, more tools, more measuring and related
tasks.

[Second]{.underline} -We have begun to focus on issues for
reauthorization. Five themes have emerged from our discussions:

> Data \-- Minimum set of "instrumentation" or information capability
> for our major highways and arterials.
>
> Institutions - Establishing and supporting virtual or real regional
> institutions that have the accountability for the core mission of
> integrated system operations and planning for operations.
>
> Policy - Establishing three distinct missions in surface
> transportation legislation -- construction, maintenance, and
> operations.
>
> Money - Do we need dedicated funds for operations, a block grant
> program, and a return of the TOPICS program? Or is the flexibility
> that we currently have enough?

Conclusion

A year ago we launched a National Dialogue on Operations at this
conference -- and at that conference one of our first questions was
money -- but I think many realized that money wasn't the only issue.

In this last year we have made real progress.

We understand the problems better -- their dimensions, their costs, and
consequences.

We understand better what it is that it is going to take to optimize our
system operations.

With that progress -- I think we can be far more credible and strategic
in addressing the issues of reauthorization.