Good afternoon. At this time all participants are in listen-only. If you would like to ask a question at the question and answer period, you can press star 1 to ask a question. I turn it over to Jocelyn Bauer. Welcome to the May version of the Talking Operations Webinar, hosted by the National Transportation Operations Coalition, NTOC. The title of today's Webinar is Regional Traffic Signal Operations Programs – Planning and Funding. I’ll be giving be giving a brief introduction to the web-conferencing environment prior to turning the session over to Darren Buck from the Federal Highway Administration who will serve as the moderator for today's seminar. Today's seminar will last approximately an hour allocated for the presenters and a half hour for audience questions and answers. Please be advised that this webinar is being recorded. During the presentation, if you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box in the chat area on the left side of your screen. Send your question to everyone rather than just the presenters. The presenters will be unable to answer questions during the presentation, but Darryl will use the questions for the last 30 minutes of the seminar. A file containing the audio and video portion of the seminar will be on the website. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the seminar. We encourage you to direct others not able to attend the seminar to access that seminar online. The presentations are available in the download screen, click on the name of the file you would like to download and the button at the bottom of the download box that says save to my computer. Darren Buck, our presenter for today, overseeing outreach activities of the national transportation Coalition -- Darren worked in similar roles in the [indiscernible] community and small federal program creating jobs for people with disabilities. Received MA from University of Maryland in College Park and is currently [indiscernible] durn things over to Darren to start us off. Thank you very much. This month's edition will explore and regional traffic systems. We have a great line of speakers from the federal highway office of planning, who will provide an overview of how the planning process can be engaged to identify common objectives to sustain resources needed for effective regional traffic operations programs. We will have examples of how this process has been implemented successfully from some of our key stakeholders from the Portland, Oregon, and Fargo, North Dakota areas. First speaker is Laurie Law, transportation planner, been with federal highways over 25 years, involved in transportation planning, the last three transportation authorizations. Her expertise includes administration of metropolitan and state-wide transportation planning, transportation safety planning and federal aid grant management. From the Portland Oregon area, Dina Plattman, coordinates development, implementation and planning. Served as Metro's regional freight planner, Portland freight master man, and numerous corridor studies, received masters in regional planning from political science from UCLA. Finally, Mr. Wade Cline, executive director of the Fargo Moorehead metro -- the capacity, works with implementation of the 2008 Fargo-Moore head metro be -- implementation of the 2008 FHWA workshop in Fargo, resulted in the assessment of the Fargo-Moorehead -- adoption of traffic operations action plan in 2009, and in eight-year tenure involves in all facets of the planning program in the area. Graduate of St. Cloud state university in Minnesota, degree in local and urban affairs. I will pass it to my colleague Mr. Eddie Curtis. Thanks, Darren. I wanted to say thank you to the participants on the line and extend a thank you to the folks that helped put this Webinar together in addition to the speakers who graciously agreed to join us today. First two, regional transition system management and TRB signal system committee, and FHWA office of operations collaboratively worked to put this Webinar together. This is the first of a series we will present on the topic. I wanted to quickly give you an overview of what regional traffic signal programs are all about. A fair amount of resources have been invested into evaluating the state of the practice for traffic signal operations. There have been two traffic signal report cards, and a very telling report by the government accountability office in 1994. Each report really points to institutional issues as the primary barrier keeping us from improving and sustaining improvements in traffic signal operations. The Federal Highway Administration resource center, in response to requests from agencies after the traffic signal report card in 2005 and 2007 put in requests for technical assistance. How do we improve signal operations? These started as reviews, peer exchanges with individual agencies, a process where we go in, conduct surveys, field studies to, get an idea of what's going on in an agency, region, and a report comes out with a list of recommendations. We found as we conducted these reviews the list of observation and recommendations tended to be very similar as we went from region to region. I have highlighted some of the key observations and you can see regional consistency and signal management and operations was high on the list. Looking at number 3, consistently saw complaints, as opposed to outcome measures looking at how the system operated. A big one we saw leads to why we are having this Webinar today, most regions were not capitalizing on all the available funding source. We will look at each of these issues and today specifically funding and planning issues. There's a document available now, download it, the regional traffic operations program, an overview, an amalgamation of planning operations, regional concept of traffic operations, signal reviews we have done, operation green light, looking at some of the more prominent regional will signal systems in the nation. We saw a variety of activities that these regional systems are engaged in. This report is a synopsis of all the information. It's a good look into what regional signal programs can accomplish. This approach is based on what I will call an objectives and performance measures driven approach. Something identified in the planning for operations program within the office of operations. And ultimately, this approach will produce sustainable improvements in funding sources for traffic signal operations. I will quickly put up a link to where you can find these documents, my contact information. If that's something that piqued your interest, I am the point of contact, we will try to organize a review if you are region. I will turn it back over to Darren. Thank you. Darren: I am sorry, I just gave a wonderful introduction with my mute button on. I will turn it over to the office of planning and miss Laurie Lao. I am in San Francisco, still morning for me. I will talk a little about funding and planning, transportation planning process. Although it sounds like a simple subjects it's very complicated and convoluted. Every time I talk to a traffic engineer I get frustrated, I don't think they understand what I am talking about and I don't understand what they are talking about. It's a two-way street. Traffic engineers ask me: How do I get projects implemented? Part of my presentation will be, as we talk about it, developed. These are interesting questions because not only do I hear this from traffic engineers, but these are the rules of how the federal aid program works. A lot of the questions, always asked about, why is planning process that important? Where do I get information about it? Why do I care? When do I need to get involved and who is responsible for these things? As I parse it out, it is about funding, the eligibility, the process, the whys and the where, who is required to do this, and the federal aid and transportation process, if you are not familiar with them, it is going to be the road block in how you get your projects into the system. Scheduling is also the when of scheduling is really important. The MPOs in the state have processes that are on a certain schedule, and if you miss certain schedules you have to wait for it to come back around or use amendment processes that take a lot more effort. This is my favorite, gatekeepers, that's us, planners, always accused of speaking our own language, having our own little clique, but there are roles and responsibilities. One thing is that if we all understand what the roles and responsibilities are it makes the process go that much faster. Once you understand the ins and outs of the planning process and federal aid process you will be better are able to navigate your projects, and getting them advanced. These are my symbols of what we are talking about on the bottom here. Let's talk about funding up front. In aid there are pots of money, and eligible to fund traffic signal operations. I will talk a little about them. Seedy Mac, I am sure you are familiar W the congestion mitigation air quality fund. This pot of money is to alleviate congestion and air quality issues. If your region is a non-attainment or maintenance area, you will most likely have these funds, but every state will have some of these, but a very limited amount in that it is intentionally for those non-attainment and maintenance area. For projects to improve transportation system management and operation that mitigate congestion and air quality, these are usually 80% federal and 20 match. There's also the highway bridge program, used to be the HBRR program. These are for projects to rehabilitate rehab rehabilitate or replace bridges. They are eligible if the TOC is to take care of bridges, that is also 80-20 program. A new or revised program under SAFETEA-LU is the highway safety improvement program. This is a -- even though it's safety, it is funds to be used on projects on any public road or publicly owned bicycle pathway or trail. Really, a good match; if you have operation or strategic highway safety plan, this is also where you could access lots of safety funds for the operations side. This fund is a 90-20, in some cases, rural high-risk road, 100% funding. The next group is the IM, interstate maintenance. Any projects on the interstate system is eligible, also 90-20. The other group is NHS, really for anything on the national highway system, a higher category of roads, usually the principle arterial systems, and it is a very flexible, in that 50% of the funds can be flexed on the STP group. I will talk a little about that. This pot, really for anything NHS, ramp, data collection, all eligible. I add on here, you may not know much about the SPR, the state planning and research program part 2, a research program. Certain features, equipment, elements that are experimental can be funded with this, however, usually the state, because this funding group is controlled by the state, requires that there's a research report or evaluation that has to be done. This is also an 80-20 program. The last I want to talk about is surface transportation program, probably the most flexible of all the category of funds, can be used anywhere in the state. One thing I did notice, under SAFETEA-LU, elements added was project related to intersections that have disproportionately high accident rates or high congestion and located on federal aid highways, eligible for funding. This is going very well with traffic signal management projects. This fund is 80/20 and a good bulk of the federal aid program is in the STP area. Let's talk about why. What is the transportation planning and programming process? This is what I have on the slide, really the basis of the applying process. With the process required, in place since 1960. A three C process, comprehensive, looks at the whole transportation surface system, intermodal system, also looks at land use, interconnectives between certain programs, and is cooperative. So, it means that we work with the local agencies, member agencies, citizens and cooperate together and share information, but it is also a continuing process so that when we develop a plan as a result of a process it doesn't sit on the shelf. We are constantly updating it, and the process continues on. Once you do it, it's done. Let's talk a little about regional vision and goal. Usually, within the planning process we expect the MPOs to have a vision goal and there are planning factors that are in legislation, eight of them. One is on operation and mitigating congestion, so if nothing else I would anticipate most, if not all, MPOs have very similar goals, but if you notice, there are certain -- three arrows on the side here. This is where the traffic engineers and [indiscernible] pay most attention to in the planning process employ . Once you have the goals you start looking at the operations available and start designing the needs of the system and strategies in which to address the needs. That's when we start talking about the improvement strategies. Once those are identified, then we evaluate and prioritize these strategies so there is correlation -- not the sequential, but definitely a lot of these elements are going on together. Once we have developed, evaluated, prioritized to develop which strategies, projects are going to be funded in the future, we kind of package this up into a long-range plan. The long-range plan is a 20-year plan. This is when I would think the traffic engineers, management folks need to pay attention. Are your projects in the long-range plan? Why does it need to be in the long-range plan? Who do I need to talk to about these issues? From the long-range plan we get the dip and tip, the funding document, list of projects funded in the near future, usually the next three to four years. From there we get to project development, operation and monitoring system data and go back to the beginning one more time. It's the continuous loop. There are certain planning products. I don't expect everybody to remember all these things, but these are the most important ones. The first three, the UPWP, the unified planning work program, and the metropolitan transportation plan, and the TIPSs, for metropolitan planning organization. The last two are for the state, rural areas. What I want to talk a little about the [indiscernible] concerns on how the planning funds will be used, the MTP is a 20-year document, the TIP is four-year investment project on the state side. A long range plan also. That plan is [indiscernible] nor does that have projects in it, and the [indiscernible] is the final overall document programming for the state. So the tip includes all the metropolitan tips. What should you care about? These points, when you develop projects, be very clear about your purpose and need, how well they fit regional goals, the vision and goal. Build them into the corridor studies the MPO is doing, make sure it's consistent and doing performance-based planning, make sure the data and performance measures you have for traffic operations are built into the planning process and you identify them, share with the transportation planner. If it serves one purpose, then those projects have a better chance of competing. This is the real key, you have a firm reasonable cost estimate, we are seeing a lot of projects deferred because they don't have a good cost estimate and once we find out the real cost of the project a lot have to be deferred. 50,000 population TMA -- anything 200,000, we split them, because TMAs have control over STP attributal funds they get, and could award those to projects, have a little more authority than the regular MPO. The MPO relies on the state to give the budget. The attainment, non-attainment we talked about, C Mac allocation and those in the rural area, there may be state that's require you to do planning because of the regional transportation planning agencies. These are considered RTPOs, you might be doing similar things, but those are state, and not federal requirements. How long does a programming process take? This is the Oregon one, it's a three-year process, even most states update the stip or tip annually it's a four-year cycle, four years of projects, you can tell this would be in 2008, when O DOT would be deciding to budget, priorities, getting comments, where to put the money, and approving the revenue forecast and money in the program. This is year one; a 2010 document, they started in 2008, occurred in 2009, and identifying projects doing prioritization, going out to public review. 2010 they go to public review, consolidating much of this with the metropolitan TIPS. Approval comes in 2010, 2011, you will have to start early. I will highlight the key points here you may consider to get involved. The gatekeeper, these are questions Eddie asked, what kind of relationship do we have, common objectives, to communicate and coordinate with your transportation planner are. That's the most important element. If you could communicate, coordinate know who they are, half the problem is solved. I am going to sum up here, get to know who your MPOs and state planners are, where they are located, what they are doing. What is their planning and programming cycles? Where are they at right now? If there's an application process, what is it, how do you get involved, what are the project selection criteria. Timing is everything. If it doesn't work out, you need the project right now, you have funding, then there's also the possibility of amending it, but it's a somewhat arduous process. In final, resources, if you don't know who they are, I would say these are the people to contact if you are local MPO, state planning, programming section or FHWA division. Just for your information I added a slide with the fact sheet on what the funding groups are if you want additional information, and also, a website for the office of planning located here. With that, I will turn this back over to Darren. Thank you very much, Laurie. Two quick administrative notes, be if you have more than one person sitting at a work station viewing this Webinar we would really appreciate it if you would put in the chat box the number of viewers you have besides yourself. A quick reminder, we will take questions when we are through with the presentations. Feel free to write questions in the chat pod and we will pick them up, answer as many as we can after the presentations are complete. With that, I introduce Dina Plattman, with Portland, Oregon's TPMO. I am looking at the clock, it's darn near 10:30. Laurie did a great job of setting me up to be able to share Portland's experience with planning and funding our regional traffic signal operations. I am going to talk to you about our regional coordination framework, key achievements, and plans for the future as it relates to improving signal operations. Quick introduction to the Portland, Oregon region. Our metropolitan area comprises three counties, 25 cities, we have a strong bi-state with neighbors to the North, Vancouver, Washington, considered part of our larger region although they have their own MPO. What's important to know about us, we're a growing region, expecting to add over a million residents over the next 20 years. With that, growth we anticipate the usual challenges, increased demand on services, more congestion on road ways. Portland is well-known for its work over the last decades to [indiscernible] using transportation planning to grow compactly and sustainably. Our regional culture is one of cooperation on issues big and small. Our approach to the management of our transportation systems really reflects that norm of cooperation. You will see as I weave the story of the Portland region and our work on system management. The management of our regional traffic signal system is spread across many operating agencies. We don't have a regional traffic system controlled by a single entity, but we have an effective regional strategy for system management and the signal system. I have to say this is due to the tremendous level of coordination we have between our traffic operation staff across the region and the transition into the planners. The glue is really the group transport, regional advisory committee on operations. This slide show ons the collection of agencies actively participating in the group. Transport first emerged in 1993. ODOT, our state transportation agency was developing a regional management system, a plan for the region, and they formed an advisory committee. What the operations staff found was that these regularly scheduled meetings were really valuable opportunity to coordinate across agency issues and they just kept meeting, for the last two decades. In 2004, metro, the agency I represent formalized transport as the region's operations committee and the [indiscernible] JPAC. I want to talk a little about where we've been regarding advancing our traffic signal management. Over the last decade we have been slowly creating a fiber optic network as a commune communication background for the intelligent transportation network. To coordinate traffic management, travel and incident management, all activities identified in that regional ATMF plan created in the mid90s. In 1997 the cooperative telecommunication committee, CTECs, was established as a managing body for fiber sharing. The founding members, regional transit agency, decided pooling resources maximized efficiency and was in the best interest of the public. Since 1997 we had other agencies join and contribute their fiber on to the nets work. CTEC is focused on the collective well-being of the communications system, each agency sharing responsibility. These arrangements are in place, shared arrangements, used to define roles, responsibilities for the network. It's important to note no funding exchanged hands, all the agencies contributed their portion to the network without worry about who is getting more and regarding the funding. The graphic on the side shows the architecture of the network. We are still working to complete the network. There's still gaps. Right now we are focusing on connecting Vancouver, Washington agencies into the ITS network. Another significant transportation initiative is centralized traffic signal systems for the region. In 1988 the city of Portland put in place a centralized system within their jurisdiction. An update in early 2000 was an opportunity for transport to expand the system to include all signals in the region. The goal was to have better overall management and maintenance of the signal system and be able to manage progression across agencies. So transport committee got together, worked on the specifications, developed the requirements they wanted for the region, and the city of Portland took lead on securing a software license that allows partner agencies to participate in using the software package, using transsuite software, I am sure some of you will recognize that. The city of Portland maintains a central server, [indiscernible] responsible for remote servers within their agencies and agencies are connected into the ITS fiber optic or communications network I just spoke about. The transport established uniform standards for traffic controllers and servers and I understand the communication equipment, there's a little more flexibility on that one. An example of the way the transport has come together to pool resources for the common good. There was no exchange of funding, but rather a commitment to shoulder their piece of the system. In the future, transport is looking to realize traffic management operations center to center-shared control. Right now we don't have a centralized traffic management operations center in the region. Operating agencies have developed their own TMLCs. The goal is to link those toy create a virtual centralized TMLC. I will touch a little on planning by operations folks. Since the first ATMS plan ODOT led, continued, early 2000s local transportation agencies and [indiscernible] developed ITMS plans, many efforts supported by NTIP funding, metropolitan funds. Collaborated on creating and updating our region ALI TS architecture document. Now I am going to shift over, talk about where we are right now. Transport's efforts, past efforts and today, have really shaped regional transportation planning. This is where we come into talking about, providing example of what Laurie was talking about and talking with planners to integrate operations. By the mid2000s, transport was a very well-established committee, leveraging operation funds to advance their regional initiatives. The group's leaders recognized the need to better integrate into regional transportation planning, developing our long-range plan, as well as MTIP to be able to secure funding to advance initiatives more quickly. We found operations-focused projects did not compete well for funding against traditional, roads, sidewalks, infrastructure. In the same time frame the Portland region was selected for an FHWA regional coordination demonstration. We were charged with creating region concept of -- this turned out to have really transformative benefits. There was a I strong education, outreach component, to share what the region had been doing around operation and explain the benefits of it. The ARTO redefined the approach, we were beginning an update, 2035 update of the plan, and the timing was perfect to integrate. There is a core emphasis on system management. We will see final adoption this year of the RTP. Lastly, it led to the creation of an MPO program called the regional mobility program, which has dedicated to integrating operations into our planning. I am currently leading that group. So the regional mobility program has taken over the management of Transport, and its subcommittees. We are managing our congestion management process and providing leadership on management initiatives. First activity was development of regional -- 10-year investment strategy integrated into 2035 RTP. Where are we today? I said the plan was completed last fall and accepted by our MPO board, metro council in December 2009. I included a link to the plan at the end of this presentation, builds on the previous work done by transport and developing ITS plans for the region. We were able to bring in a transportation demand management component, build what they had a five-year plan to a 10-year strategy. This shows the four investment areas in the plan, multimodal traffic management, travel information and TDMs. Under each investment area we identified region-wide, corridor-specific investments. With regard specifically to regional traffic system, the plan is supporting completing and maintaining our ITS network and signal system deployment. We are aggressively deploying update of equipment to support the next generation of traffic management tools like adaptive signal systems. We currently have one adaptive corridor in place, in the process of designing several more. We are looking to expand transit signal priority corridors across the region. We are advancing our integrate corridor management program. Right now we have a single corridor outfitted as ICM corridor. We identified several more we are going to advance over the next several years. We have been actively installing pedestrian count down -- really popular with our citizens. And we are installing bike signals at key trail crossings. Another thing, when we talk about, particularly performance measurement, we are experimenting with data collection techniques, we have quite a bit of data on the freeway system, but arterials, most places we are challenged with being able to get good operations data. We are interested in having this data to support operation and travel information, and established close relationship with the university transportation center at Portland State university, they have ITS lab portal -- researchers to store, share data. With regard to funding, art owe was helpful to be able to -- regional N tip funds to operations. In previous funding cycles, projects didn't compete well against recognizable projects. Our MPO board's increased awareness of lower cost operations solutions and transport's quiet success led them to carve out about $6 million in MTIP funds. Transport was charged with identifying projects. We established a list of projects to be funded under the $6 million, taking the list to our council, board, this May, using the plan set us up for future program allocations. We are in the process of starting our next regional flexible fund allocation and looking for the years 2014 to 2015 and are fully expecting to have another programmatic allocation to support operations. People have been very pleased so far. During the development of the plan we had two other funding opportunities that allowed us to jump-start implementation. One was ODOT offered an $8 million grant for innovation -- working through Trandz Transport, able to secure half of that funding, active traffic management funding, variable speed sign in the location. Other funding opportunity that arose during this time was our federal stimulus dollars, able to respond very quickly to the opportunity, with a project on signal timing on 10% of signal system across the region. Right now, with our plan in hand we are looking ahead to the opportunities arising from the federal transportation bill coming up. Grove to wrap up, I would say the Portland region is in a great space for advancing traffic signal management. We created a supportive political environment, focused policy in place, and have the clear investment strategy. The one challenge we are facing right now, transport's been active about two decade and a lot of the folks that are leaders in the group are reaching retirement age. It's really grooming a fresh staff of operations staff to assume leadership. This slide includes the link to the plan, and my contact information, and I thank you very much. Thank you, Dina. We are very lucky to have you here. We will move to the final presenter, Mr. Wade Cline, from Fargo Moorehead Council of Governments.