HEPMPO Congestion Management Process (CMP)

A Congestion Management Process (CMP) provides the Hagerstown / Eastern Panhandle Metropolitan Planning Organization (HEPMPO) with a framework to evaluate and monitor traffic congestion within the region. It also assists HEPMPO in the identification and prioritization of transportation strategies that focus on congestion and travel reliability.

The CMP has been developed through a series of steps that include stakeholder coordination, public outreach, data analysis, and location prioritization. The CMP sets the stage for future activities to further evaluate priority corridors, the identification and programming of congestion reduction projects, and the evaluation of completed congestion-focused projects.

The Stakeholder Advisory Committee has supported the HEPMPO in defining key objectives of the CMP, informing the identification of congestion locations and issues, and reviewing key materials and deliverables including the public survey and priority location mapping.

This CMP has included public outreach to capture insights on regional congestion needs and priority locations. The survey aimed to gather information from the public about what they believe are the causes of congestion, strategies to mitigate it, and locations in need of improvement.

Developing performance measures is a critical element of the CMP. Performance measures assist in identifying problem areas and communicating this information to the public and decision-makers.

 RITIS  is a platform developed and maintained by the University of Maryland CATT Lab and is used by transportation agencies across the country. RITIS provides access to the travel times for every hour and day on many of the primary roads in Washington County.

Similar to RITIS,  INRIX IQ  is a cloud-based platform that provides access to historic travel time data. INRIX IQ provides a suite of applications specifically designed to extract actionable insights from location-based data.

To supplement the above tools, the CMP consultant team leverage their corporate license to Replica HQ, which is an urban planning tool that provides comprehensive data to drive decisions about the built environment. It addresses the challenge of finding high-quality, recent data and insights related to how people move, where they move, and why.

FHWA has established a set of performance measures for State Departments of Transportation (State DOTs) and MPOs to use as required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

Public input gathered during the CMP revealed numerous comments focusing on I-81 between the WV and PA borders. This section of I-81 has also been prioritized by businesses, the public, and local governments in past cycles of the long-range plan. To better understand the reasons for concern regarding interstate travel in the region, historical travel time data has been analyzed.

The figure below illustrates I-81 vehicle daily delay totals over a 5-year period from January 2019 through June 2024. The orange line represents the 80th percentile daily delay value, a percentile used for the national performance measures. This figure shows significant variability in delays on I-81.

To supplement the national measure trends and to provide context to a broader range of roadways including those outside of the NHS, an additional assessment of historic regional traffic delay (in hours) has been conducted using available INRIX travel time data for Washington County.

The figure below provides the process used to identify the priority congestion locations for this CMP update. The process included integrating past information from the 2022 LRTP, analyses using GPS travel time data, over nine hundred public map comments, visual observations of the corridor, and other insights and comments from the CMP stakeholder committee.

The CMP includes developing an online map to store and visualize all collected data. The map provides additional features including the visualization of CMP congestion location details that can be enabled by selecting each of the locations individually.

A diverse array of potential strategies was assessed using a CMP Strategy Toolbox. While some corridors have been previously analyzed in separate studies or have projects already outlined in our Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) and Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP), the CMP provides a synthesis of general strategy categories tailored to the unique needs of each corridor. Moving forward, HEPMPO is committed to collaborating with state and local partners to further scrutinize these corridors and refine or develop new projects or strategies as necessary.

Within the overall transportation planning process, the CMP provides quantitative congestion information that can be used by decision-makers at the MPO, local government, and DOT levels. The CMP is a critical element of an objectives-driven, performance-based planning approach, and the integration of the CMP data with the TIP and LRTP is an important part of project decision-making.

The CMP is anticipated to be updated regularly to support coordination with the TIP and LRTP. The HEPMPO will continue to monitor the region’s status concerning TMA designation, which will ultimately make the CMP a requirement with formal federal review.

In the ongoing effort to refine the CMP, the HEPMPO remains committed to engaging with local stakeholders and the public to identify and address critical congestion locations. During the recent update cycle, we received numerous public insights regarding congestion concerns. Some of these concerns were not designated as top priorities in the current CMP iteration, primarily due to travel time data not substantiating these locations as the most congested within the region. Nonetheless, the HEPMPO acknowledges the importance of these observations and the limitations of the available data and will incorporate them into future corridor studies and planning assessments.  

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Public comments were accepted through June 20, 2024.