TRANSCOM is a coalition of traffic and transit agencies in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut metropolitan region. TRANSCOM and ITMS share an essential guiding principal. As Tom Urbanik of Texas A&M and others have noted, ITMS is "multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, multi-modal and multi-jurisdictional," and it "should be transparent to the user . . . and responsive to local needs." The New York metropolitan area, with literally hundreds of government jurisdictions with enormous variation among their missions, is an excellent testing ground for this guiding principal.

This white paper will identify the multi-jurisdictional issues in developing, implementing and managing multi-modal ITMS. With illustrations from TRANSCOM's experience, it will demonstrate how working relationships can be developed among modes, among states, cities and counties, between toll authorities and DOT's and between police and civilians.

Over the last several years, we have found that the lessons we have learned in developing a multi-jurisdictional ITMS coalition are more universal than we originally thought. Through discussions with colleagues from other regions, and through research done by organizations such as USDOT's Volpe Center and the ATA Foundation, we have found that the issues we have been dealing with are not necessarily unique to the large, jurisdictionally diverse New York metropolitan area. These general principles include the following:

It is TRANSCOM's mission to bring about cooperation among dozens of agencies on incident notification, regional incident management, and construction coordination, as well as to serve as a multi-agency test-bed for implementing ITS technologies. We are frequently referred to as the United Nations of transportation. Like the UN, TRANSCOM has enormous responsibilities and very little authority to carry them out. This lack of authority does not deter us, for our coalition can be very effective when our member agencies see how their individual and collective interests can be enhanced through cooperation.

Located in Jersey City, NJ, TRANSCOM is administratively and legally a unit of its host agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, though it is governed, funded and staffed by all of its member agencies. TRANSCOM's Operations Information Center (OIC) is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It shares incident, construction and special event information simultaneously and selectively among over one hundred highway, transit, police agencies, and media traffic services, by phone, fax and alpha numeric pager. It maintains a shared data base of its member agencies' construction projects. When necessary, it brings specific agencies together when conflicts, such as parallel closings between projects, are likely to result without cooperative intervention and mitigation.

With funding and guidance from the Federal Highway Administration, TRANSCOM implements and tests transportation management technologies. This technology development program focuses on initiatives which are most efficiently done collectively. This could include installing a variable message sign (VMS) on one side of a state line to benefit another state. It also includes more cutting edge efforts, such as designing a regional architecture to ensure communications among its member agencies' current and planned ITS systems. Another joint ITS operational test involves TRANSCOM testing the use of electronic toll collection equipment for incident detection. In this case TRANSCOM is undertaking this effort in behalf of its members and FHWA.

The New York metropolitan area is immense, fractious and jurisdictionally diverse. Throughout its history, there have been many attempts at regionalism, some based on idealism, some on pragmatism, and some based on both. The agencies TRANSCOM deals with have enormous operating responsibilities, and they work in an environment of budget pressures and often intense oversight by the public, the media and elected officials. A coalition like TRANSCOM can not be seen by busy officials from these agencies as "professional do-gooder regionalists." If these officials are only involved out of a sense of obligation, their interest will ultimately diminish. Such idealism is important for motivating many of us on the TRANSCOM staff, but it is hardly in itself sufficient for transforming a coalition dedicated to ITMS from an abstract ideal into a going concern. What has worked for TRANSCOM is that its member agencies see that multi-agency response is often a necessary means for serving their customers.

Just how TRANSCOM serves as a necessary means for helping its member agencies, and dozens of affiliated local agencies, to serve the travelling public, is best illustrated through examining a major incident. One of the best examples of a severe incident from the past year is the complete closure of Interstate 287, the Cross Westchester Expressway, for almost 24 hours. Not only did this incident affect travellers in all three states in the metropolitan area, it affected travellers in other parts of the Northeast Corridor. I-287 is an integral part of one of the two main corridors for people and freight through the New York metropolitan area. I-287 is not far from the Tappan Zee Bridge, a major Hudson River crossing. This incident was caused when a propane truck went out of control and hit a bridge abutment early one weekday morning. The resulting explosion took the life of the driver and caused structural damage to an overpass.

In the case of this incident, the three TRANSCOM member agencies responsible for the operations and maintenance of I-287 (the New York State Thruway Authority, the New York State Police and the New York State Department of Transportation) had their hands full dealing with the problem on site. They were focusing on public safety, structural integrity, and on moving traffic on and off the Interstate, in cooperation with local authorities. There were a number of regional issues that had to be dealt with and this is where TRANSCOM assumed a significant role.

Notifications—The first regional responsibility involved the need to make extensive notifications. The initial call, and subsequent updates, came into TRANSCOM from the Thruway Authority's communications center in Albany. Through its alpha numeric pager system, supplemented in some cases by phone calls and faxes, dozens of agencies that needed to know were informed of the incident. This included dozens of local and county agencies on both sides of the Hudson River. Major agencies feeding traffic into this corridor from New Jersey and Connecticut were informed, as were agencies operating facilities in parallel corridors which could expect higher than normal volumes as the AM peak approached. Also included in this initial notification by TRANSCOM were the media traffic services, not only those in metropolitan New York but, with a few hours to intercept traffic coming from outside the region, in Hartford, Providence, Boston and Pennsylvania. One call to TRANSCOM saved the Thruway Authority from making dozens of notifications. This is particularly important in light of how busy they were with the incident.

Traveller Information—The second regional responsibility involved rapidly implementing an integrated, multi-agency mobilization of VMS and highway advisory radio (HAR). Every member agency with fixed and portable VMS and HAR makes these resources available to other agencies through TRANSCOM. As an example, ConnDOT mobilized VMS on I-95 south, warning their customers of the I-287 incident far enough in advance to utilize other major routes through the metropolitan area. They also mobilized signs in locations, such as Hartford, that intercepted some traffic in time to keep them completely out of the metropolitan area, taking more northerly diversion routes. Closer to the incident, TRANSCOM remotely mobilized the Thruway Authority's HAR.

This use of numerous HAR/VMS in three states that day reveals two key points for making multi-jurisdictional ITMS work. First, the self interest of each member agency was served by assisting with traveller information resources. The incident may not have been on their roadway, but it was their customers (customers who care about their total trip, not about specific agency jurisdictions) who benefitted. Second, different agencies have different rules about mobilizing VMS/HAR at TRANSCOM's request. Some want us to have direct access, some will do it themselves from a phone request from TRANSCOM, and with some there are even other variations of protocol. What's key for TRANSCOM is that we do not ask for uniformity of procedures from among these agencies. This lack of uniformity is our problem if we want to make the coalition work. A key lesson here is that if you don't have authority, don't pretend you do or try to get it, just meet your constituent agencies far more than half way and get the job done for them.

"Real Time" Construction Coordination—The third major regional responsibility for TRANSCOM involved minimizing construction that day on roadways that would be likely to be experiencing an increase in volume due to diversion around I-287. I noted above that TRANSCOM maintains a data base of its member agencies' construction projects and brings agencies together to work out modifications in scheduling when inter-agency conflicts exist.

Sometimes, though, we do not have the luxury of planning ahead and the closure of I-287 is a good example of this. While it maintains a long term data base of construction projects, TRANSCOM also keeps track of each day's activities throughout the region. Thus, as the day approached, we knew what was likely to be taking place after the morning rush. The records also said who was the engineer in charge on site. Numerous agencies agreed to either cancel construction for the day, reduce the amount of lanes taken or pull the construction if congestion resulted during the day. As an example, since the parallel George Washington Bridge/I-95 corridor was likely to be hit with diversions from the Tappan Zee/I-287 corridor, TRANSCOM asked the Port Authority to pull construction from the George Washington Bridge that day. The Port Authority willingly agreed to do so.

This third regional responsibility worked because, again, agency self-interest and regional, multi-jurisdictional interest were not in conflict. The Port Authority, for example, knew that its customers would be better served if construction were pulled that day. Further, they also knew, as had already happened on numerous occasions, that they could count on the Thruway Authority to pull construction for the Port Authority when there was a problem on the George Washington Bridge.

The extensive example discussed above related to how and why the over one dozen large agencies in the TRANSCOM coalition have cooperated with each other. Another dimension to making our coalition work is how we incorporate dozens of other agencies, specifically cities and counties. While just bringing the member agencies together from three states sounds daunting enough, TRANSCOM also reaches out to municipalities and counties in order to ensure communication with all affected parties during major regional incidents. (All of TRANSCOM's member agencies are either state based or bi-state based, with one exception. The exception is the New York City Department of Transportation. Given the magnitude of New York City and its critical importance to our region, NYCDOT is a major player in the transportation system and is an essential member of TRANSCOM.)

Just why TRANSCOM needs to communicate with municipalities and counties is illustrated by the some of the Primary highways in New Jersey. While the six miles of Route 1-9 between Jersey City and Newark are owned and maintained by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, incident response is done by the police forces along the route, Jersey City, Kearny and Newark. Similarly, NJDOT owns and maintains Route 17 in Bergen County, but the Bergen County Police handles incident response. Each of these four agencies is tied into TRANSCOM's operations information center and each is on our alpha numeric pager system. Similar examples exist throughout the region.

The variability among the counties and cities in our region, including those on our network, is extraordinary. They range from a prosperous suburban county with many Fortune 500 headquarters and an economy bigger than some states to small, blue collar municipalities of under ten thousand close to the urban core. Behind each of the dozens of relationships that TRANSCOM has developed is a seperate and unique story; among these communities, there is by no means a single set of motivations for cooperating with a regional coalition. As was discussed earlier with regard to procedures for mobilizing our member agencies VMS/HAR, there is no uniformity. With regard to motivating counties and cities, this lack of single set of motivations is, again, our problem. We the coalition must constantly adapt and meet our constituents far more than half way.

A few examples of this issue are quite simple and unglamorous. For example, a number of years ago, many local police departments in New York State could not call incidents into TRANSCOM because they were not equipped to handle long distance calls to New Jersey. The solution was the institution of an 800 number and the result has been a significant increase in participation.

Another example related to costs for placing TRANSCOM's alpha numeric pagers at a number of police communications desks. While the cost of such rentals is well under $500.00 per year, a number of police agencies that otherwise wanted to cooperate did not want to pay the expense. In general, the reason for their resistance was not so much the cost, as the bureaucratic procedures required to get the budget item approved. The member agencies realized that since these police departments were reporting information on their facilities, it was important to get them on the pager system. Rather than create a complicated accounting and billing system for relatively small expenses, the TRANSCOM member agencies decided to make the pagers available for free, including the cost as part of TRANSCOM base operations expenses.

The experiences of one of TRANSCOM's steering committee members (from one of the four DOT member agencies) illustrates how support for a coalition can vary significantly within an agency. At the beginning of this article, we noted TRANSCOM's role in providing for traveller information systems on one agency's property for the benefit of a neighboring jurisdiction. This person was the representative of the agency on whose property the device, in this case a VMS, would be installed. When he was arranging for permits for installation of the VMS, he learned that a strong belief in regionalism does not necessarily work its way down to all members of the field engineering staff. In the proposed access permit, the field engineering staff put in a series of restrictions on use and control by the neighboring agency that severely diminished the real time usefulness of this equipment for the neighboring agency.

Since that time, the agencies involved with this VMS have made considerable progress toward an amicable understanding on its installation and operation. Our steering committee colleague, though, had an interesting observation on multi-jurisdictional ITMS. "You know," he noted, "I have spent the last few years advocating new, multi-agency ways of solving problems. It is something else, though, to actually have to test one's commitment to coalition building when it affects my own agency's control over its own facilities. While we will ultimately work this out, it shows that these commitments are not always easy to make."

This recent experience reveals another key point about making multi-agency ITMS work. Namely, there is a major intra-jurisdictional element that needs attention if the multi-jurisdictional element is going to work. Surely, it is important to have an advocate in each agency such as the colleague in this anecdote, one who has access to top management, as well as to people in the field. Nonetheless, it is a tall order to have everyone you need in a huge bureaucracy be knowledgeable about what you do and on your side at any time. In effect, you never reach an optimal point in coalition building, it is a process involving constant outreach and constant renewal.

Inter-agency cooperation on transit incidents has become an extremely important activity at TRANSCOM. In order to understand why these alliances with the transit agencies have developed, it is useful to view the bus and rail sides of transit separately, since their motivations for working with our multi-jurisdictional coalition are not entirely the same. Bus operators are extraordinarily dependent on our highway member agencies in order to deliver a service to their customers; put another way, they are by definition involved in a multi-agency alliance. Commuter rail and rail transit operators have their own discrete right of way (and we have no street running light rail in our region). Rail transit incidents tend to have to have a higher threshold of severity before they have an inter-agency impact.

New Jersey Transit Bus Operations was an early participant in TRANSCOM and they continue to be active. They operate all over New Jersey, and serve midtown, uptown and downtown New York through three separate Hudson River crossings. On a typical run, their buses can cross over roads and crossings under the jurisdiction of NJDOT, NYCDOT, the Garden State Parkway, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Port Authority and a range of county and municipal traffic departments. Their commitment to sharing information with our regional coalition is logical one, in which agency interest and multi-jurisdictional interest are compatible. TRANSCOM's focus is on incident and construction information as it affects entire corridors and the region; NJ Transit buses travel on corridors and not just one agency's facility's. With NJ Transit, TRANSCOM has gone beyond fax, pager and phone to have a direct two way radio linkage with NJ Transit's communications center. Further, with their buses equipped with radios, NJ Transit buses have served as "probes" for TRANSCOM, calling in incident information.

In encouraging rail transit operators to share incident information with TRANSCOM, we have worked with a different set of assumptions. As noted above, because rail operators usually have unified control of entire corridors, the inter-agency impact of an incident tends to be less. TRANSCOM's relationship with PATH, the Port Authority's transit system between New Jersey and Manhattan, illustrates this point. PATH was also an early participant in TRANSCOM and they too continue to be active.

Particularly for work trips, PATH exchanges passengers with other major transit operators in the region. On the New Jersey side it connects with, among others, NJ Transit commuter rail and bus lines in Newark and Hoboken and, on the New York side, with NYC Transit Authority subways and buses. A major delay to a PATH line to or from Newark or Hoboken has a significant regional impact. It can affect thousands of NJ Transit and Amtrak passengers expecting to change to PATH at Newark to gain access to lower Manhattan. Similarly, when PATH's line from the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan to Newark goes down for the afternoon peak, there is a major diversion to the New York City subways to get passengers to Penn Station in midtown, as well as the Port Authority Bus Terminal. When this happens, TRANSCOM quickly notifies the NYC Transit Authority, given the impact on crowd control, pedestrian movement and token sales at the World Trade Center.

The inter-agency linkages for a major PATH incident are far more numerous than the two examples cited above. The key issue for PATH is that it is in its operational interest to share information with TRANSCOM. The burden upon its operations and communications staff during an incident is enormous; one call to TRANSCOM removes a significant multi-agency communications burden from them. Through TRANSCOM, PATH is also a significant consumer of incident information from other agencies. Further, building on the logic used by our highway members in multi-agency sharing of VMS and HAR, it is making its Metrovision television monitors available to provide information on incidents on connecting agencies' facilities.

In 1992 I co-authored a paper for a TRB ITMS conference with a member of the law enforcement community, Sergeant Paul Einreinhofer of the Bergen County, NJ Police. Thus, the relationship between police and multi-jurisdictional ITMS was a key focus of that effort. At the time, we noted that:

What Sergeant Einreinhofer and I said in 1992 holds true today. Since that time, one of our most successful efforts was in planning for and cooperating during a major special event that affected travel in the entire northeast. Our partner and biggest advocate throughout this effort was a police official. Similarly, the individual who has shown the greatest reticence about participating in our coalition in the last few years is also a police official. In our experience, police bring an intensity and dedication to their work that can be a major asset in building ITMS, as long as they believe in what you are trying to do.

Toll authorities are a major player in ITMS in our region and, given national trends, they are likely to be an even greater factor in the future elsewhere, as well. People have at times asked whether our toll authority members are willing to participate in regional, multi-jurisdictional coalitions. This question is asked from the perspective of whether toll authorities are willing to accept the potential revenue impact of diversion from their facilities during major incidents.

When toll authorities know they can not handle the volume during an incident at an acceptable level of service, they willingly accept TRANSCOM and its member agencies' help in keeping traffic away from the impacted facility. However, when information on an incident on a toll road comes from a third party, we always seek permission of the toll authority first prior to making a notification. Particularly when toll authorities have major construction planned, they encourage diversion from their facilities and are appreciative when agencies running parallel facilities pull their own maintenance and construction work to accommodate the alternate demand.

As one toll authority official has said, "we have reached a point where demand far exceeds capacity; service to our customers includes letting them know about those occasions when our capacity is severely restricted due to major incidents and construction." Participants in our coalition from the toll authorities also know that the revenue impact ultimately equalizes over the course of a year, as they in turn accommodate surges in demand due to diversion on other facilities.

In conclusion, this paper has examined how TRANSCOM has been able to bring a range of agencies into a multi-jurisdictional ITMS. I have looked at the issues from a number of dimensions: cities and counties, state DOT's, transit agencies, police agencies and toll authorities. In each case, we have tried to go beyond the "do-gooder" reasons for building a coalition to actually understand how to motivate an agency to make a clear and willing connection between the regional interest and its own interests. While we assumed a number of years ago that the issues we are dealing with are unique to our own large and jurisdictionally diverse region, we have actually found that the lessons we have learned are more universal than we originally thought.