Overview
The National Operations Center of Excellence (NOCoE) hosted the TSMO for Resiliency Peer Exchange on June 23, 2026, a virtual gathering, to examine how transportation systems management and operations (TSMO) practices support the resilience of the transportation system. Participants included state departments of transportation (DOTs), a metropolitan planning organization (MPO), a regional water management authority, and partner organizations.
- Funding is the field's binding constraint, not technology. Every presenting agency named it independently, and it topped the roundtable's live poll as the day's biggest challenge.
- Resilience still has no foothold in the formal processes that decide which projects get built. The Wilmington MPO (North Carolina) and North Carolina DOT both described prioritization and scoring formulas that treat resilience spending as pure added cost, with no accepted way yet to credit the risk it avoids.
- Dedicated resiliency-manager roles are an emerging organizational gap. Hawaii DOT and Florida DOT each named the absence of one as their agency's biggest structural shortfall.
- Frontline, operator-level relationships matter as much as formal plans. Maryland SHA and MDTA's Key Bridge response and PennDOT's I-95 Cottman Avenue response both relied on phone calls and radio access built long before the crisis.
- Tools built for crisis response keep paying off afterward. RITIS, StreetLight Data, and portable camera fleets that Maryland and Pennsylvania stood up for their respective incidents went on to serve World Cup planning. NCDOT's flood-gauge network has scaled from roughly 50 to more than 780 since Tropical Storm Debby proved its value.
- Resilience and reliability are not the same thing, and the field still lacks metrics that make the distinction, a gap Jason Dicembre of Maryland SHA and others raised directly.
- Unexpected partners closed real gaps. The Eastern Transportation Coalition adjusted Waze's routing for Maryland's detours, Vail Resorts is a formal partner in Tahoe's emergency planning, and city police ran Philadelphia's local detour so PennDOT could focus on the highway itself.