FY2025 Work Program

Minimize congestion in the DVRPC region and enhance the ability of people and goods to get where they need to go by means of a well-maintained, safe, integrated, multimodal transportation network that serves everyone. The Congestion Management Program (CMP) is a medium-term planning process that advances the goals of the DVRPC Long-Range Plan, strengthens the connection between the Plan and the TIPs, and helps to implement and achieve the federal Transportation Performance Management target-setting and reporting requirements.

A CMP uses data and performance measures to identify and prioritize congested corridors, intersection bottlenecks, and other facilities on the regional transportation network. It helps determine the causes of congestion and develops multimodal transportation strategies to reduce congestion to allow for better mobility and accessibility across the region. The CMP assists with considering alternative strategies to mitigate congestion rather than building additional roadway capacity, and with developing the required supplemental strategies where additional capacity is needed.

The CMP is a data driven, performance-based approach that addresses all elements of federal CMP regulations. It incorporates archived operations data for planning, Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO), Travel Demand Management (TDM), coordination of transportation and land use planning, goods movement, Complete Streets, safety, transportation resiliency planning, and Environmental Justice and Equity. The CMP incorporates the federal Transportation Performance Management (TPM) system performance, or PM3 measures, specifically measuring system performance and freight performance on the National Highway System. This includes PM3 reliability and CMAQ congestion measures and targets. The CMP continues to evolve as more refined data and software tools are available to identify and analyze congestion.

DVRPC’s CMP is nationally known as a leading practice, and has been cited in both of FHWA’s CMP guidebooks. We endeavor to stay in the lead of the state of the practice in order to do effective work in the region, and to excel within our resources. The FAST Act reinforced the existing CMP, including the TPM requirements and that continues under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The use of archived operations data for planning has been essential to the CMP and preparing for TPM requirements. This has been facilitated in part through participation in the Eastern Transportation Coalition.

The focus areas for FY 2025 include: implementing the Transportation Performance Management (TPM) requirements, developing CMP supplemental strategies, identifying CMP best practices from peer MPOs around the nation, and conducting before/after evaluation of projects for strategy effectiveness. Completion of this project may require the purchase of equipment or services.

1. Transportation Performance Management (TPM).
   • Stay informed of changes to TPM regulations and guidance and continue working with other DVRPC staff, and with planning partners within and outside the region, such as DOTs and adjoining MPOs, to set, monitor, and achieve performance measures targets.
   • Conduct necessary technical efforts with NJDOT, PennDOT, MPOs, and other planning partners on updating, maintaining and using PM3 performance measures and setting 2- and 4-year targets. The reliability measures include Level of Travel Time Reliability (LOTTR) and Truck Travel Time Reliability (TTTR), and the CMAQ congestion measures include Peak Hour of Excessive Delay (PHED) per Capita and Percent Non-SOV Travel.
   • Coordinate with planning partners in monitoring progress toward attaining the targets and preparing data to report on-the-road performance for the second 4-year performance period. Review and discuss with the PM3 Urbanized Area coordination groups, CMP Advisory Committee, and other planning partners.
2. Use the CMP in Project Development
   • Get the most long-term value from investment by developing supplemental strategies for projects that will add road capacity by coordinating with multimodal partners, and tracking the progress being made in keeping with regulations. Update a CMP Supplemental Projects Status Memorandum report that provides the current status on supplemental project commitments for major SOV capacity-adding projects. Maintain an online database that provides access to Supplemental Strategies report information.
   • Participate in internal DVRPC processes to implement high priority recommendations from NJDOT problem statement reports. Participate in NJDOT Complete Team, Congested Places, and CMS-21 programs, and conduct field work or prepare draft problem statements, as necessary, for submission to NJDOT staff as requested and track results.
   • Participate in the PennDOT problem statement development process as applicable for major SOV capacity-adding projects, which is now partially facilitated through the PennDOT Connects process, and work with PennDOT and DVRPC subject matter experts.
   • Review TIP and LRP projects with respect to consistency with the CMP objective measures and perform any other multimodal alternative analyses. Coordinate results using TIP and Long-Range Plan benefit evaluation criteria for prioritizing projects.
3. Stay Current with CMP Practices
   • Investigate and report on CMP Best Practices to update the DVRPC CMP as appropriate. Review other peer MPO CMP programs, FHWA information, and other reporting and research (e.g. TRB). Develop recommendations on how the DVRPC CMP can be streamlined and enhanced to further improve project identification and implementation as well as DVRPC and regional plans and policies.
   • Stay engaged with the fast-evolving use of archived operations and origin/destination data for planning. Important areas include: calculating travel times and traffic delay from INRIX and other sources; facilitating how estimated traffic counts can be derived from travel time data; creating corridor performance reports; and integrating origin/destination trips data into the CMP to understand better where shorter and longer trip patterns are occurring to help in identifying mitigation strategies for different corridor areas. This can be done in part through engagement with The Eastern Transportation Coalition, and with DOT partners.
   • Continue to improve understanding of the effectiveness of individual CMP strategies through sketch-level models, cost/benefit studies, and before-and-after analysis.
   • Participate in CMP-related efforts by regional and national partners based on invitations and time available.
4. CMP Data Collection and Analysis
   • Perform before and after traffic evaluation studies of projects intended to mitigate congestion to help understand the effectiveness of the strategies. Incorporate archived operations data, and consult with project stakeholders and the CMP Advisory Committee. Analyze pre- and post-pandemic travel data to monitor shifts in travel.
   • Use existing CMP analysis and other studies to refine CMP strategies to manage congestion by subcorridor, especially TDM and transit strategies.
   • Maintain CMP website.
   • Perform ongoing CMP data collection and analysis using INRIX travel time, traffic volumes, and other data to identify trends in system performance across the CMP network, including focus roadway corridors. Refine and update strategies to mitigate congestion based on performance measures with guidance from the CMP Advisory Committee.
     
   • Collect, prepare, and analyze non-recurring congestion events from Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) and TRANSCOM databases, such as traffic incidents, adverse weather, and construction to better understand where these events are occurring on the transportation network, and the causes of congestion. Coordinate with PennDOT, NJDOT, planning partners, and other DVRPC staff.

1. Reporting of biennial PM3 reliability and traffic congestion measures and targets. Coordinate work with DOTs and other planning partners for presentation to the RTC and DVRPC Board, as applicable.
2. Documentation of the status of supplemental projects.
3. Reporting of Best Practices of CMP.
4. Develop before/after project assessment reports reviewing performance for corridors and/or intersections using various measures, including, speeds, travel times, congestion, reliability, delays, and bottlenecks to help understand which treatments and strategies may be more effective than others, and continue to promote the more effective ones. The RITIS PDA Suite platform and tools will be used to help in this effort.
   
5. Further develop processes for monitoring congestion and reliability along CMP focus roadway corridors on a systematic, semi-yearly or yearly basis, for project assessment and evaluating the effectiveness of improvements for managing congestion. Assessments would be made for specific projects like adaptive signaling treatments, or more broad programs, such as travel demand management. The processes could be further developed for pre-defined intersection areas.

Member governments and agencies, organizations involved in managing congestion, businesses and citizens served by a more efficient and reliable multimodal transportation network.