Launching a Successful TOC

We continue to strive for intelligent transportation systems, believing that if we are diligent and clever, mobility will improve. The argument is quite persuasive. If we build smart corridors, traffic operations centers (TOC), incident management programs and all manner of gadgetry we must be improving mobility. I fear that some of the more elemental requirements are not being properly attended to.

This article attempts to ease my fears. It is an examination of evolving TOCs as part of the ITS implementation. This article was conducted through the lens of public policy and administration (PPA). This PPA approach focused on TOCs in the context of government and its function for society. There were four steps to this evaluation. First, I discussed the general sense of TOCs and mobility. Then, I investigated public management and policy theory with potential application for evolving TOCs. Third, I developed a mission statement, providing legitimacy for TOCs. Fourth, I constructed a logic model of TOC outcomes with associated performance measures. My conclusion is TOCs have a legitimate function. With attention to a proper mission statement, striving for legitimacy as a function of government and providing proven performance, TOCs should evolve and muster the resources to be a viable and productive public service.

TOCs in context

A primary concern is our legitimacy as a government function. Most transportation departments were born with the mission of building highways. Our various agency organizational cultures captured this strong mission statement and developed the bureaucratic machinery to fulfill it. Natural goals sprouted to design, contract to construct and maintain a vast roadway network. Additional necessary functions were eventually identified and fostered from the national level down to the local regional level.

One nationally identified and fostered function that continues today is the operating of our transportation system to achieve its greatest benefit. From this have come the integrated control system and the ITS initiatives. These efforts focus on putting tools in place to provide for the operations mission. These national initiatives have materialized locally in various forms of TOCs, and things are changing.

Does the public view transportation operations as a legitimate function of government?

Often in California additional transportation revenues are raised expressly forbidding they be used for operations.

Within transportation agencies, are TOCs viewed as central to the mission and entwined in the organizational culture? Operations legitimacy as an agency function, I contend, has not been fully understood and developed. With this ambiguous context, I explored TOC legitimacy and viability both vertically and horizontally.

Vertically, does support exist from the public and agency administration? Horizontally, does support exist from other transportation entities and agencies?

Public policy and administration

Traffic operations are a new and developing function of transportation agencies. The international ITS initiatives focus light on traffic operations within agencies. This increased attention provides a fertile set of conditions to positively advance TOCs. If we as operations practitioners widen our view, horizontally and vertically, we may potentially improve vastly our standing with the public, within our agencies and throughout transportation. The two aspects of PPA through which I wish to view TOCs are policy and the political process and the managerial tools and theory for public managers and administrators.

Agendas, alternatives and public policy

In his 1995 book Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, John Kingdon provided a framework of agendas, alternatives and public policies to evaluate where the TOC fits in a political setting. There are three continuously flowing streams. There is the stream in which conditions exist. The acceptability of the condition changes propelling it to the problem level upon which actions must be taken. The problem gets framed, defined and perhaps symbolized. This provides the agenda to which everyone must focus.

For the purposes of this article, the problem is the completion of the Interstate Highway System and the realization of continuing congestion.

The policy primeval soup provides policy alternatives in the policy stream. This is a garbage can model in which policy experts have policy solutions stacked up in a garbage can waiting. Our policy solution is ITS which couples the concept of smart transportation systems and operational efficiency.

The last stream is the political stream. National mood, political actors and organizing forces work to put forth various problem solutions. The ITS initiative first appeared in the transportation reauthorization bill Intermodal Surface Transportation Equity Act (ISTEA) discussion of the late 1980s.

Kingdon?s framework provides policy windows as the conception of how the three streams couple to form policy. I believe the window for what eventually became ITS was the downturn in industry and economic conditions in the late 80s. With that climate, the pursuit of smart technology-driven transportation systems was a natural and politically acceptable use of resources.

The Federal ITS Initiative operates as a demonstration of technology potential with ultimate sustainability left to local jurisdictions. Now, similar policy vignettes are being played out at the local level throughout the country. Each provides a variation on one or more of the three streams. Policy entrepreneurs, local ITS advocates and perhaps TOC managers are waiting for the policy window through which they will pass. For traffic operations, this means both internal and external legitimacy and continuing resources.

Managerial initiatives

There are two public managerial/entrepreneurial conceptions that are valuable for TOC development. First, creating public value. Second, creating and increasing interagency collaborative capacity (ICC). Both of these con-

cepts implemented by public administrator/policy entrepreneurs/TOC managers will provide the impetus to succeed in putting together a viable TOC. Each one forces the evaluation and acceptance of vertical and horizontal factors in establishing and clarifying legitimacy.

Creating public value

In his book, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Mark Moore identified creating public value, among other insights about public value, as managers mustering the resources then ?establishing and operating an institution that meet citizens desire for properly ordered and productive public institutions.?

It is critical that the public views the TOC as productive and valuable. Further, the public wants efficient transportation, both in terms of individual trips and the use of public resources. Traffic operations must go about establishing its institution within transportation while actively creating public value for TOC customers. Public value must be inherent in the mission and goals established for the TOC. Moore provided a strategic triangle for effective missions and goal development:

l First, be ?substantially valuable in producing things of value to observers, clients and beneficiaries at a low cost in terms of money and authority?;

l Second, be ?legitimate and politically sustainable? in continually attracting ?both authority and money from the political authorizing environment in which it is ultimately accountable?; and

l Third, be ?operationally and administratively feasible in that the authorized, valuable activities can actually be accomplished by the existing organization with help from others who can be induced to contribute to the organization?s goals.?

There are varying degrees of acceptance of the strategic triangle in establishing effective mission statements and subsequent goals, but the opportunity exists. As changes in traffic operations occur, pushed by ITS efforts, we need to keep Moore?s admonishments in front of us, in our conscience mind. Gaining and maintaining legitimacy in society requires incorporating public value at the most basic level.

Incorporating public value into the TOC?s mission and goals will effectively guide our internal structure and resource allocation. We must then contemplate the idea of product and production. Public sector services can distinguish the two but often blur them. There are three reasons that directly affect our efforts:

One, designing a production process requires a product. Two, in public services the client often consumes both the process and the product. Third, overseers often have special interest in aspects of the production process. We are tasked with providing traffic operations leading engineers to focus on the production process.

I submit we have yet to solidly identify our product. We blur the two with a combination of perceived client and oversee functions ancillary to true products defined by public value captured in the mission statement. As public managers of TOCs, we must be diligent in defining products and subsequent processes that create and capture public value.

Interagency collaborative capacity

In Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship, Eugene Bardach describes concepts of ICC and managerial craftsmanship useful in TOC formation. Our TOCs will exist in a larger world of transportation, both providing and receiving services. In this world of transit, highways, commercial operations, interregional travel, regional mobility problems and emergency services we must develop ICCs.

Bardach defines a collaborative as ?any joint activity by two or more agencies that are intended to increase public value by their working together rather than separately.?

Agencies associated with transportation have a common, if not well defined, goal of providing the public with mobility. Transportation agencies came into existence with different and varied missions. They have developed different constituencies and advocates. Furthermore, in the greater context, these mobility problems are intricately tied to problems of affordable housing, jobs/homes mix, equity, economic vitality and sustainability. Continued authority and legitimacy come from different sources. Regardless, at some level transportation agencies work together. What we lack in our transportation collaborative is the increase of public value and the truly joint activity of sharing of resources. As we work toward the future of TOCs, efforts to forge ICCs among transportations disparate agencies will be critical to our success.

Bardach defines ICC?s five main tasks as ?fashioning a high-quality operating system, acquiring resources, creating a steering process, developing a culture of trust and joint problem solving and managing a strategically sequenced development process.?

Operating systems of the individual agencies provide supportive organizational cultures that encourage and motivate. Production level employees are empowered, both structurally and with resources, to creatively go about obtaining the organization?s goal with an eye to outcome results. The acquiring of resources refers to resources for the ICC, the individual agencies in the total. By nature, each agency is protective of autonomy and agency resources. This is the real issue in the creation of public value. If it is done properly, there exists the potential to get resources outside the transportation ICC. Creating a steering process for ICCs requires a commonly accepted mission.

The culture of trust and joint problem solving speaks to the bureaucratic nature inherent in agencies. Each agency serves a different cause, with different regulations, constraints, procedures, personnel structures, managerial culture and so on. There are many pragmatic approaches to developing the needed culture of trust. I would point to the need for social capital as being the key foundation requirement. When individuals from different agencies are dealing with each other on intimate personnel levels, a culture of trust can truly exist. Finally, there is the concept on strategic development of ICC. Momentum and legitimacy are vital to the development and maturation of the ICC. It is my belief that the burden of providing ICC strategic development will ultimately fall on the very same policy entrepreneur/TOC manager waiting for the policy window to open. TME

Need for a real mission statement

We go about establishing TOCs with varied views as to what we will accomplish. Some establish incident management regimes. Some focus on system performance as the mission. Some desire an information gathering and dissemination mission. In the larger transportation collaborative of creating public value, these focus too narrowly. As we build ICCs in the transportation community, we will want the public to empower us with a stronger and clearer legitimate function.

I submit that Traffic Operations be viewed as two planes. Plane one is the broad stroke of transportation, a function of government to provide public mobility. The second plane is the more refined view of Traffic Operations providing products that propel transportation's legitimate government function. A TOC mission statement must capture the need to perform on both planes, implying that one overall transportation mission is desirable.

A real mission statement

With the broader implications of viewing the TIC implementation in a Public Policy and Administration lens, I have laid out my arguments for my mission statement. With the use of a logic model, I have organized TOC functions, outcomes, and flows. Interwoven with the discussion of my logic model will the identification of viable pertinent performance measures.

I content that the true guiding mission statement of transportation is the provision of safe and reliable multimodal trips that meet the public's expectation of resource use. This captures value that the public places on transportation and our legitimacy in government. Further, each agency associated with transportation can ascribe to this mission providing the guiding mission for ICC. This mission statement is specific enough to focus resources and general enough to provide for co-production and entrepreneurial efforts. This mission taken on at regional levels allows the publics variable value systems to be effectively captured by ICCs and subsequent resource use. Transportation agencies, working in collaborative, can aspire to the single mission and focus resources to products and production processes internal to the individual agency. In the case of TOCs, we are in the position to produce operations efficiency and information, both valuable apparatus to the mission. Various customers, other agencies, individual citizens, or the private sector are potential consumers of these TOC products.

The logic model

The government accountability movement stresses performance measures as an indicator of the effectiveness of governments providing services. We in transportation have struggled to develop appropriate measures. I wish to present a set of performance measures that are a direct result of viewing TOCs through a PPA lens.

In other words, from the perspective of an overall guiding mission statement, aligned functions, products, with vertical and horizontal support and legitimacy. To accomplish this I develop, in theoretical vacuum, a logic model. Performance measures theorist, Harry Hatry refers to them as Outcome-Sequence Charts.

Normally, logic models are painstakingly developed with extensive input. Everyone struggles to define functions, battles over sequences, argue about connectivity, and throw up their hands trying to pinpoint proper performance measures. My point with this logic model is to demonstrate the effect a PPA perspective has on TOCs. Figure 1 contains my TOC logic model and the following is a discussion of my thought process in arriving at this model.

Beginning by working from right to left, focusing on the end outcome derived from the real mission statement. I simply restate my mission statement to capture the desired outcome of accomplishing it. The struggle here is providing a proper measure. Engineers may tend to focus on speeds, delays, stop dwell times, or bus schedule adherence. None of these gets at how they public truly feels about governments provision of transportation, only at one function or another. Further, I suspect the public views transportation in a larger schemata of quality of life. These are the thoughts that led me to determine that resources needed to be committed to a survey tool to determine public view of transportation performance. Bear in mind that my mission statement applies to all facets of transportation and that all facets should utilize the survey tool as their end outcome. It is my sense that this type of quality of life opinion poll performed at regular intervals with statistical reliability and validity would be natural function of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). These MPOs perform trip surveys to validate travel demand models giving them expertise and a solid organization culture to perform in. They possess regional, interregional, and national recognition and authority. Moreover, most importantly, they work to be apolitical in their function. They can provide horizontal and vertical legitimacy. MPOs could provide this most elusive of performance measure efficiently and ethically for the transportation community.

Everything to the left in the logical model depicts the TOC as an individual unit. I view the products of the TOC, while internal end outcomes, as intermediate outcomes in the total logic model. ITS's vision is maximizing system performance by implementing sophisticated technology to provide improved operations. This vision appears to be the focusing point among operations professionals. My belief is that these realizations come when TOCs provide products for consumption that meet expectation and are acted upon. Things such as multimodal trip planning with reliability and packaging traveler information for various consumption modes will by TOC's future products/end outcomes. Keep in mind the potential for many different customers such as emergency services and commercial vehicle operators. A benefit of this product-oriented view is the simplicity of the performance measure, consumption. We would go about TOC business utilizing many market concepts based on consumption rates for various products.

Further to the left in logic model are some more conventional thoughts about TOCs. At some level, existing TOCs analyze and monitor systems while responding to various customer issues. These are evolutionary results of the original function of providing signal-timing data to be entered into signal controllers in the field. Resources and processes are in place and operating. The lager issue is providing an acceptable measure of performance. Responding to customer concerns often falls under the jurisdiction of government-wide initiatives of responsiveness. TOCs should define a response turnaround timeframe that meets available resources and measure adherence. A more difficult measure is that of system performance. True system performance may be measured by comparing actual field observations to an optimized-modeled system. Pick any combination of model tool and field observations that make sense to the individual TOC and meld them together. The measure comes from adapting to changing conditions and maintaining an acceptable percentage of actual to optimized conditions.

The final identified Intermediate Outcome in my logic model is interagency incident management. Much of my previous discussion about creating public value and increasing interagency corroborative capacity bears fruit now. The ICC efforts create public value, adding legitimacy, support, and resources to the TOC institution. This effort sprouts on the two planes of the mission statement. On the higher plane of the transportation arena, the ICC allows the macro level of integration of disperse resources for travelers.

On the plane closer to the TOC, the ICC provides more intimate sharing of resources to provide effective treatment for incidents of all kinds.

TOCs provide a backbone structure and technically oriented organizational culture that dovetails nicely with other transportation interests. Measuring performance in incident management relates to interagency cooperation and incident management effectiveness. Standard operating procedures for this type of activity is a debriefing. As each TOC and ICC matures, a logical and resource efficient measure will come to light.

Moving to the far left of the logic model is what I consider as activities/input for TOCs. Collecting traveler information such as seeds, bus schedule adherence and headways, stop dwell time, densities may be viewed by some as a higher-level function of TOCs. The focus on technology, ITS, smart corridors and the like tend to muddle the issue. These things are necessary. They simply provide input information. Measuring this performance concentrates on the amount of data collection devices and their appropriate application. Appropriate applications are determined when information is desired by circumstances and is available to the TOC. A more controversial aspect of my logic model is that I consider traffic signal timing as an activity/input. I view this as a fundamental shift in the TOC mission. While what gets implemented in the street is strategic in TOC functions, it simply provides input to the intermediate outcomes. Travelers process through trips simply reacting to our inputs and we monitor that process for performance. Therefore, signal controllers are inputs to the TOCs.

One final note about the logic model and the performance measures, they are viable for all TOCs. The implementation of a MPO led survey initiative on a national level for all regions would provide transportation and quality of life connectivity. The survey tool would be inclusive and used uniformly.

Concluding thoughts

Viewing the national debate about performance measures for transportation through the PPA lens proved insightful. The PPA conceptions allow operations professionals to broaden their focus to evaluate their place in governance. There are some very strong issues to be dealt with for long-term effectiveness. Create public value, develop viable ICCs, and embrace vertical and horizontal validity.

Transportation organizations must continue evaluating alternate ways of going about the business of mobility. Many varied theories and an abundant amount of knowledge can be brought into the debate. Whether the evolution is incremental or cataclysmic, I believe we need to more forward. It is hoped that this normative constrictive appraisal would provoke thoughts, ideas and meaningful debate about our collective future. There are problems to be solved.