Overview
Pennsylvania’s TSMO effort was initiated by the national movement to create a statewide TSMO program as well as PennDOT’s participation in the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP2) Organizing for Reliability workshop. During this workshop, PennDOT and other key transportation management stakeholders around the state established a collaborative baseline for the state’s current level of operations and identified preliminary actions to improve operations utilizing the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), a process traditionally associated with the optimization of processes in computer software projects.
Pennsylvania generally identified anywhere between a Level 1 and Level 2 for the dimensions during the self- assessment. The initial CMM assessment is crucial to building a successful TSMO program in Pennsylvania. It establishes a baseline and allows PennDOT and their stakeholders to develop a series of strategies to improve transportation operations and address the challenges and special demands of congestion management. Using the initial assessment and subsequent reassessments will allow Pennsylvania to track the progress and success of the strategies that have been implemented to date.
The development of the TSMO program also included a series of workshops intended to collect feedback and issues from stakeholders that pertain to the development and advancement of the program in Pennsylvania. Stakeholders included PennDOT Central Office and Districts, FHWA, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), Rural Planning Organizations (RPOs), and Transportation Management Associations (TMAs). The stakeholder input was summarized and needs were developed to classify the issues that surfaced during the stakeholder workshops.