Newsletter of the
ITS Cooperative Deployment Network
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ICDN: First of all, give me some background on Brevard County, FL. How big is the county?

Kamm: The population of Brevard County is 500,000. It is on the East Coast of Florida, immediately east of the Orlando area, and includes the area around Kennedy Space Center.

ICDN: In your presentation at the 2004 ITE Annual Meeting, you discussed some new transportation operations initiatives that your MPO began to initiate about 3 years ago, right?

Kamm: That's correct. In December of 2000, we were adopting our long-range transportation plan. The MPO found that, of course, long-range plans have to be cost-feasible, and we would only have 50 percent of the funding necessary to do the capital projects that we would have liked to implement. So the MPO asked, "What becomes of the projects that we don’t have capital funding for?" With discussion and staff support and direction from MPO members, we focused on traffic operations as a way to address the needs on these facilities that we didn’t have capital funding to address.

ICDN: Does that direction presume that you can tackle transportation operations projects for less money than other capital projects? Was that the point, because it does take money to do traffic operations?

Kamm: It does take money, yes. But there was a recognition that we needed to do more with the system that was already in place. We needed to maximize the efficiency of the existing system, and recognized that traffic flow on our existing system was impeded, in part, because the agencies involved were not coordinating with each other.

ICDN: Of course, the MPO's role, in large part, is to help foster coordination among the area's agencies, right?

Kamm: Certainly. It seemed a natural fit for our MPO to take on this role of fostering interagency coordination to help improve traffic operations in our area.

ICDN: You had not done this before?

Kamm: We had not done this before. We had left that task to the individual operating agencies. There are about 15 different municipalities in the county in addition to Florida DOT, and each was going about its own business and not really coordinating with each other on very simple things, like traffic signal progression, signal design, and access management. Ranges of things that different jurisdictions have under their control were not being coordinated. The MPOs felt that they should address this coordination function and focus particularly on traffic operations.

ICDN: Didn't your county have a so-called Traffic Management Team, or "TMT," with which to raise such issues on a regular basis?

Kamm: There was no such group before the MPO got involved. When the MPO decided in December 2000 that they wanted to support operations, it wasn’t clear at that time exactly what form that activity would take, or what recommendations or considerations would come forward. It was left to the [MPO] staff to develop the framework for how to go about achieving the MPOs directive. We decided to form a new Traffic Operations Committee. I was intent to have senior staff with budgetary and policy oversight over traffic operations involved on the committee. Therefore, the committee could make decisions that affected where resources would be applied. I did not feel that we needed technicians to be involved; I was interested in having more senior staff from local agencies as well as FDOT involved.

We assembled this group, and it was the first time we had ever met together. The participants did not understand each other’s processes, so these meetings gave everyone a chance to understand the different agencies' limitations and directions. If that’s what you're calling a traffic management team, then perhaps we have one now but we didn’t before.

ICDN: So your Traffic Operations Committee, or "TOC," was formed in late 2000?

Kamm: It took us awhile to get our arms around this issue. We finally got the committee going in June 2001.

ICDN: Does this committee typically meet at the MPO's offices?

Kamm: We meet in the county complex, and the MPO staff sets up the meeting. We had been meeting about every other month, and had good participation. We now meet quarterly. It is important that an organization like an MPO that has regional responsibilities has transportation operations planning as part of its mission. The MPO has access to these different agencies, has staff to provide administrative and technical support, and has the ear of elected officials that set the policy direction for addressing traffic operations. These are just some ingredients that, to me, are important in setting up the institutional arrangements that allow coordinated traffic operations to work.

ICDN: Let’s get back to the specific case here with the Brevard County MPO. In your conference presentation, you said that the TOC identified seven different locations that needed attention, and then whittled that list down to three specific projects to address, right? Over what period of time, and about how many meetings, did that "whittling process" take?

Kamm: It probably took about a year because several steps were involved. We did not know what the answer was going to be going into that process. We were making decisions at a staff level on how to present information. The committee was experimenting with different ideas, so there were some fits and starts before we finally arrived at the product that we eventually took to the MPO. The process wasn’t initially that clean -- it evolved, because there is no handbook on how to do this. I could not call somebody up in another MPO and ask, "How did you do this?" because nobody else really had been doing that that I was aware of.

ICDN: "That" referring to transportation operations?

Kamm: Doing these operations functions at this size of an MPO. Yes, big cities have done it, but they had totally different situations and resources and staffing levels. However, I was not aware of any smaller MPOs like ours that had taken on these responsibilities. It took awhile for us to collectively define the problem, decide what we wanted to achieve, and develop a process to identify projects. Our goal was to eventually identify some priority projects for the MPO’s consideration.

ICDN: You achieved that goal in identifying those three projects, right?

Kamm: Right. We started with a longer candidates list, but it's very important to keep it simple.

ICDN: How did you begin to identify these three projects out of a large number of possible candidates?

Kamm: We looked at locations where the volume/capacity (V/C) ratio exceeded 85%.

ICDN: I'm sure that the MPO has been looking at V/C ratios for a long time, but traditionally that analysis was conducted for long-term planning purposes, right? This time you had a different objective in mind, right?

Kamm: Right.

ICDN: Are V/C ratios sufficient to winnow down the selection process, or would more detailed analyses or even simulation help out?

Kamm: The committee was interested in keeping it simple and using existing data that we had on hand, and was not interested in inventing something elaborate and new. We already have a database of roadway segment capacities, so we focused in on intersections and used that database to identify candidate intersections on the state highway system that had at least one leg with the V/C ratio greater than .85. We put those candidate intersections on a separate list, and then removed any intersections that would be addressed as part of other upcoming improvement projects or road widenings. We then checked these locations for reasonableness and double-checked them against previous corridor studies to see if we were missing anything.

Eventually, we came up with a short list that we asked the DOT to evaluate more thoroughly as to feasibility and cost. We didn’t want to get into something that was so extraordinary that we wouldn’t be able to fund it through this program. So we ended up with these three candidate projects. In our view, this was a very simple process. We don’t have enough money to address everything on the list, so it's pointless to try to differentiate between project number 25 from project number 26 if you only have enough money to do the top three. The trick is to get to this top group of candidates that everyone can agree are problems, rather than working on an elaborate system to identify and prioritize more intersections than you can reasonably address.

ICDN: Don't the projects that win in this type of collaborative activity typically benefit multiple jurisdictions? Don't MPOs tend to favor projects that benefit a number of their constituent agencies rather than just one or two?

Kamm: There's no question that we were sensitive to geographic distribution, but that was not the driving reason a project coming forward from the committee to the MPO. Rather, the driving force was a consensus of the Traffic Operations Committee that a particular project was worthy of implementation. There is a tendency for MPOs to be overly sensitive to jurisdictional distribution, but ours is very much a needs-driven process.

ICDN: Give me a brief snapshot of the first three projects to emerge from this process.

Kamm: Those three projects included:

1. A major bottleneck in the middle of the county. This project involves adding capacity at an intersection on a major state road in the downtown part of the City of Cocoa to alleviate queuing over a high-rise bridge.
2. A queuing problem in the City of Melbourne. This project involves correcting an inadequate intersection on a surface street in Melbourne that causes traffic to back up and queue onto an Interstate ramp and sometimes on the mainline.
3. The junction of two state roads in the beach area. This project involves adding dual left turn lanes at a high volume intersection where a causeway joins the main beach road.

ICDN: Did the MPO board approve all three of these projects?

Kamm: Yes. The committee came forward with two basic recommendations: 1) a process to select projects that identified these three as the highest need projects, and 2) a request that dedicated funding be set aside for these projects. Elected officials at the local level are very sensitive to "unfunded mandates" coming down from above. True to that sensitivity, they were not inclined to send unfunded mandates back up the line to the state DOT, either. Instead, they decided to set aside a certain percentage of the funds that the MPO has under its programming control for these projects.

ICDN: These are Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) funds?

Kamm: These are some state gas taxes and federal Urban Attributable funds under MPO programming control. We "boxed" the funds, set them aside. They are dedicated for implementing the projects that the MPO identifies through this traffic operations committee process. So we have a technical process. We have a mechanism in place to coordinate our activity, the understanding of what data we need to use to identify projects, and then we set aside some money to actually implement them.

ICDN: How much money was set-aside for all three projects?

Kamm: About $1.1 million a year is reserved for the traffic operations projects the MPO prioritizes.

ICDN: What is the status of these three projects at this point?

Kamm: All three are in design right now.

ICDN: So all three will be implemented in the next year or two?

Kamm: That is our objective, yes. The DOT is managing these projects and, frankly, we need to be able to track project progress better. There is a lot of interest in these three projects, and I would like to make sure that we regularly receive up-to-date information from FDOT so that we can report progress at our TOC meetings.

ICDN: This was the first time that you had gone to the MPO board for, if you will, "operations improvements." Of course, they had earlier approved setting up the TOC, so they weren’t entirely naïve about operations issues. However, I take it that they were enthusiastic in support of those types of projects, right?

Kamm: I've been dealing with MPOs for more than 25 years, and I hear all the time from elected officials and the public at large their frustration about the length of time it takes to make major projects happen, their high cost and the disruption that they generate. My experience with traffic ops projects is that elected officials love them. This was not a hard sell on our part. These projects are visible and they are meaningful to their constituents. They are addressing real tangible problems that people encounter day-to-day, they are relatively inexpensive, and they can be implemented relatively quickly. Just as importantly, they can be done within the term of office of many of the elected officials that sit on an MPO. Therefore, there is considerable support among elected officials for paying attention to traffic operations issues if we do it in a logical and rational way.

ICDN: What I am hearing from you is that you believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, right? Is the TOC continuing to meet?

Kamm: Yes, it is. We are still working with the three projects that we identified earlier, and we will conduct another round of project identification next year. I see this is an ongoing process -- not a one-time thing -- so I suspect that over time we will be seeing more and more of these operations projects in our work program.

ICDN: Ideally, once these three projects are implemented they will fall off the list of priorities, because the V/C ratio for these locations would presumably drop below your threshold level, right?

Kamm: That's right, and other problem areas will bubble up. I also want to make the point that even though this committee has been focusing on intersections and traffic signal coordination, it will also serve as an entry point for the MPO to discuss various ITS-related solutions on a broader scale. We have the proper people in place at the committee level. They have confidence in each other and an understanding of what they are about. FDOT has implemented some ITS measures on the Interstate system, but when it is time to move off that system onto the arterial network, this committee will be in place and able to help both the MPO, FDOT and local agencies implement ITS in a broader way.

ICDN: Perhaps in a longer-term sense too, right? Some of these ITS projects might be multi-year projects instead of near-term projects.

Kamm: Yes, because we now have the institutional structure, the trust-building, and understanding among agencies that will allow other things to show up on their agenda that we had no other way to talk about previously.

ICDN: The Traffic Operations Committee seems to be such a useful entity -- why wasn't it set up 15 years ago? What has changed recently that makes it feasible now?

Kamm: I have asked myself that question a lot. It seems to me that MPOs by their very nature are really poised to assist in implementing traffic operations in a more coordinated manner. I am not quite sure why they are not more involved in it. It may vary from place-to-place but traditionally, MPOs' roles were related to long-range planning. MPOs grew out of the Interstate highway program, that's what their staffs understand, and that's what their policies and procedures typically encompass. But we’re not building the Interstate system anymore. In my view, it's time for MPOs to move beyond that traditional role -- not ignore it, but move beyond just long-range planning and focus much more on the current state of the transportation system. We need to pay much more attention to managing our infrastructure. MPOs and other regional organizations need to be paying attention to operations, safety, and security in addition to their traditional role in long-range planning.

I also want to make the point that what an MPO focuses on in a particular area should be appropriate to that area. We are not all Los Angeles or Chicago. Some larger areas now rely on elaborate data-and-resource-intensive regional analytical systems to support transportation operations. That may make sense for them, but smaller areas sometimes look at those kinds of systems and think, "I can’t do that, I can't get there."

ICDN: You are talking about some of the big data-intensive traffic management centers (TMCs)?

Kamm: Right, like some of the things we saw today [at the ITE Annual Meeting] on using GPS probes to generate real-time traffic flow data. That is beyond the capability of an area like mine, so there is a tendency for staffs in smaller areas to say, "we can’t do that" and to fall back to doing nothing at all. There is something in the middle, something between doing nothing and these full-bore, heavy-duty programs that we see in major regions. Attention needs to be paid to that middle ground, where most of the MPOs are and where many people live. You hear about the big city activities, but there are things that can be done in smaller regions. We have congestion, too. It is not as traumatic, but still, doing nothing is not satisfactory in our case, either. That is the message I am trying to get across -- things need to be done that are appropriate for the level, the scope, and the size of your area.

ICDN: You mentioned that the TOC will be working on longer-term ITS plans. It is also possible that they may lead the region toward some of these bigger, data-intensive projects as a long-term goal?

Kamm: We would probably do it in cooperation with the DOT -- that would be the link. I don’t see us undertaking it ourselves; I see us cooperating in a partnership role with a state agency to work in that direction.

ICDN: The other thing I am hearing you say is that you already have enough data to justify the types of projects that are on your radar screen today, right? You can go into your existing data repository to identify those severe bottlenecks that need to be addressed.

Kamm: Yes. The data we use is pretty easy to get. We intentionally developed a system to use the data we had, which goes back to the comment about "keeping it simple."

Bob Kamm can be reached at bkamm@brevardmpo.com