 Good morning, my name is Linda Howe. I'm Assistant Director at the National Transit Institute at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey and Project Manager for a national training program in major investment studies. This teleconference is part of a multifaceted program that consists of 16 presentations of a three-day training course in MIS, as well as development of a group of materials, an instructor's guide that will help you create your own versions in states and regions of our three-day training course, a desk reference for MIS study managers, and this teleconference, which is being videotaped and which will be made available to you in the next few weeks. We are broadcasting live from the television studios of Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. This teleconference is all about the new major investment study process. And as some of you may have seen in our materials we've sent out, it's your opportunity to put hard questions to the federal planners from the Federal Transit Administration and the Federal Highway Administration that helped develop the regulation. We'll run for four hours. There's a 15-minute short lunch break for those of us on the East Coast in an hour and 45 minutes and another short 10-minute break between the third and fourth hours. Most of the rest of the time will be spent responding to your questions. Those of you who do manage to get through on the phones will be on the air. But please be aware, there are about 2,000 of you out there at almost 100 sites in metropolitan areas around the country. In a moment, our moderator will explain more about how all of this is going to work. But first, let me say to those of you intending to fax in your questions, the fax number posted at your site is not entirely correct. It should read 445 and not 449. So if you'd like to mark that down, please do so. We'll remind you about that later in the telecast. At the end of this teleconference, I will go over how you can lay your hands on some of the materials developed by the National Transit Institute. But right now, I know you're eager to begin, so I'd like to tell you a little bit about Nancy Houston, who will be our moderator today. Nancy is a district secretary from the Florida Department of Transportation. As such, she is responsible for all of the planning, production, public transportation, construction, and maintenance functions in District 5 in Central Florida. District 5 is the fastest growing district of the DOT's eight districts. Prior to joining the DOT in 1988, Nancy was director of the Brevard Metropolitan Planning Organization. She's a graduate of Florida State University and has a master's degree in planning from Georgia Tech. It's Nancy's role this morning to be our host, to play Larry King to our federal panelists. Thanks for that introduction, Linda. Good morning and welcome to the National MIS teleconference. I'm pleased to be here this morning to moderate this session. First, let me introduce our panelist. Don Emerson is the chief of the Planning Analysis and Support Division in the Office of Planning for the Federal Transit Administration. His division develops FTA policies, procedures, and technical guidance on major investment studies, the NEPA process, and a variety of other technical topics. Sheldon Edner is a community planner in the Metropolitan Planning Division in the Office of Environment and Planning with the Federal Highway Administration. His main focus is to work with the Metropolitan Planning process. Jim Bedner is the chief of the Project Development Branch of the Federal Highway Administration. His office works with environmental policy, regulations, the NEPA process, and large-scale and controversial projects. He has also served five years as a district engineer for Federal Highway in Southern California. With us this morning, we do have a live studio audience made up of environmental and transportation professionals from around New Jersey and also many of you online with us around the country. Federal Highway and FTA have been developing a number of tools to help explain the MIS process. One of those is a short overview video which we'd like to share with you now. Just as the human body relies on the circulatory system for life, the economic and social well-being of our country depend on how effectively our transportation system enables the movement of people and goods. Over the years, the challenge of maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure has grown. So has the challenge of making the improvements needed to keep pace with growing and changing metropolitan areas. Congress recognized this, and in 1991, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, or ICE-T, became law. Prior to ICE-T, federal transportation funds were authorized for specific categories of improvements. In addition, separate planning and development procedures existed for highways and transit. As a consequence, multimodal solutions to transportation problems were rarely, if ever, pursued. ICE-T has made federal funding programs much more flexible and has emphasized multimodal approaches. Planners and decision-makers can now search for the best solutions to transportation problems. The resulting benefits are significant. Improved mobility and accessibility for people and goods, and new opportunities for economic development. In 1993, the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration issued new regulations for the implementation of ICE-T. These include an important element of the planning process for metropolitan areas. It is the Major Investment Study, or MIS, a strategy for addressing transportation problems and solutions having potentially high costs or impacts. MIS represents the integration of the planning and project development processes for major highway and transit projects. It can best be thought of as a collaborative process for defining transportation problems on a corridor or sub-area scale, for evaluating alternative ways to solving these problems, or considering the costs, benefits, environmental impacts, and financing of the alternatives, and for selecting the best strategies to be implemented. The MIS process can be likened to the way a savvy consumer approaches a major household purchase, of a car or a refrigerator, for instance. First, the customer defines his or her needs. What does the product have to do? Then, the marketplace is visited and products that will satisfy the needs are identified. Those products are then compared for their features and prices. Financing options are considered. Finally, a choice is made. The product that represents the best value is selected and acquired. Transportation problems come in all aspects. Accessibility, mobility, congestion, safety, pollution, livability, and economic development are just a few. Solving these problems involves making choices. Choices about facilities or packages of facilities, about policies, about funding sources. MIS helps to ensure that those choices are informed ones. MIS reconfigures and streamlines processes that have been in place for some time. MIS is also flexible. It affords a general framework that is adaptable to the nature of the problem at hand, to the range of alternatives that makes sense in a particular corridor, to the capabilities of participating agencies, and so on. No one-size-fits-all with MIS. Custom tailored is the functional principle. With the flexibility of funds established through ICE-T, MIS represents an important planning tool. It provides an adaptable framework for examining problems, exploring alternatives, and making sound decisions. As you will discover when you work with one, a major investment study is purely and simply the essence of good planning. Before we begin with our first presentation, I'd like to give you a little more information about our format. We will be dividing our time today into four topic areas. The first is decision-making in the MIS, and that'll be handled by Don Emerson. The second is collaboration in MIS decision-making, and that will be covered by Sheldon Edner. The third is level of detail for MIS analysis, and Don Emerson will handle that topic. And finally, NEPA and the MIS will be covered by Jim Bedner. After each brief presentation, we will open the phone lines for your calls. It will be helpful to focus your questions on the particular module we are covering. You may ask your question directly to a particular panelist or to the panel in general. Our phone number is 1-800-303-6789. Our fax line for questions is 908-445-0324. Now let's begin with a few-minute presentation on decision-making in the MIS, and then we'll be ready to take your questions. Don? Thank you, Nancy. The video that we just watched presented the vision of decision-making and planning. And in order to introduce this module, I'd like to review with you that vision in a little bit more detail. Second, I'd like to show how that vision of decision-making is applied in the metropolitan planning process and along the way, define a few terms that we'll be using today. The relationship between planning and decision-making is a theme that runs throughout the metropolitan planning regulations and ICT. Transportation plans, transportation improvement programs, major investment studies, management systems, and so on are all keyed in one way or another to the decisions that are made as a part of the planning process. Your job as transportation planners is to help develop information on those choices for the decision-makers that you serve. Decisions might include policies for developing the transportation system over time, how to manage the system better, improvements to make to the system, priorities for capital investment, and how to pay for those. To a large degree, FHWA and FTA view transportation planning has a problem-solving exercise. Earlier, we saw in the video the consumer purchase decision being made. In our view, is that transportation decision-making is not much different from the process that one would go through as an informed consumer. Let's go through the steps one at a time. The first step is to define the problem to be solved. A consumer who is thinking about, say, improving his or her commute to work might think at the beginning about what it is about, the commute that is not satisfactory. In transportation planning, we use the word problems to refer to situations where a region's mobility or accessibility goals are not being met. Problems can also be defined more broadly to include air quality, economic growth, for example. Second, the second step would be to identify different ways of solving the problem. Let's go back to that consumer again who was thinking about how to improve his or her commute to work. Some of the options that might be considered would be bicycling, taking transit, telecommuting. Might want to consider changing the location of your job or your home, buying a more comfortable car. You could probably eliminate some of those options right away, but other options would perhaps require a little bit more careful research and consideration. Similarly, as transportation planners, we know that in most situations there are many different ways to solve a transportation problem. Better system management, bus and rail transit, additional highway capacity, multimodal solutions, policy changes, and so on. You would want to select the most promising of those alternatives for more careful analysis and evaluation. The third step is to gather information on the most promising alternatives. Our thoughtful consumer would collect information to find out if his boss would permit him to telecommute, to see if transit is available, how long it takes, and what it costs. If the commuter was thinking about buying a new car, he or she might comparison shop and consult some of the auto buyer's guides to see what models are available at what price. Similarly, a transportation planner would develop information on alternative transportation choices. How well do these different choices address the problem? How much do they cost to build and to operate? What are their environmental effects? How are they perceived by the public? And how might those alternatives be paid for? Finally, a choice is made that balances the pros and cons of all of the different options. Our consumer would weigh the information and choose the option that best meets his or her wants and needs and that he can reasonably afford. In transportation planning, decisions on a long-range plan or transportation improvement program require a similar balancing process by MPO policy bodies and by implementing agencies. Urban transportation decisions are made as a part of the metropolitan planning process, carried out cooperatively by the MPOs, state transportation agencies, transit operating agencies, and so on. Plan and program decisions should be based upon sound technical information that is generated to help identify and evaluate the choices that are available and should reflect the goals of the decision makers. Our next chart reflects a simplified view of the metropolitan planning process. As shown, some transportation decisions can be made on the basis of system-wide planning. For example, a metropolitan area might adopt regional policies on growth and development, on mobility and accessibility, or on the cost of using the system. Other planning decisions depend upon information that can best be developed at the subarea or corridor level. This would include decisions on what we call the design concept and scope of future facilities. As you can see, the long-range plan results from a process that includes both top-down and bottom-up planning. Certainly, the plan that results from this process needs to function as a complete system. It's more than a collection of decisions made on a corridor by corridor basis. But it should also reflect conditions that are only understood through corridor and subarea analyses. Before we go any further, I think it might help if we defined a few of these terms that I've been using. First of all, a major investment is a large expansion of capacity or a large addition of capacity to the highway system or to the transit system. It's a project that is likely to have substantial cost and have substantial transportation benefits measured at the subarea or corridor scale. Examples might include adding lanes to a freeway or building a light rail line. A second term that we'll be using today is design concept and scope. This term comes from the Clean Air Act, and EPA's conformity regulation. Design concept means the type of facility. Is it a freeway? Is it an expressway? Is it grade-separated transit, for example? Design concept does not mean design, but design concept. The word scope refers to such things as the number of highway lanes, the length of the facility, the degree of access control, preferential treatment for HOVs, and so on. Now, under the Clean Air Act, metropolitan transportation plans must be specific in non-attainment areas as to the design concept and scope of the facilities included in the plan. ICT further directs that transportation plans and metropolitan areas be fiscally constrained. And that, too, requires a certain degree of specificity so that the cost of the plan can be determined. In order to reach this level of specificity in the metropolitan plan, the metropolitan planning regulations outline an MIS process. In those cases where the problems that have been identified reveal that some type of major transportation investment of one kind or another is probably in the cards and where federal funds are potentially involved in implementing that facility. The purpose of the MIS is to identify and evaluate transportation alternatives at the corridor and sub-area scale. The study then leads to decisions as a part of the metropolitan planning process on the strategies that will be included in the metropolitan plan for that metropolitan area. This, of course, includes decisions on design concept and scope. MIS is a part of the planning process. Some of you may view MIS perhaps as an added step in the process. And we would certainly agree that MIS, for many of you, was something that's new and different. Perhaps it creates a new place within the long-range planning process to think about some of the issues that, at least in some cases, weren't given full consideration prior to ICT. However, one can also view MIS as little more than a restructuring or repackaging of those steps that existed prior to ICT. This repackaging, we believe, should help streamline the process in the long term. As an illustration, the consideration of all reasonable alternatives has long been a part of the preparation of environmental documents during the project development process. MIS has effectively integrated the planning process and the environmental process for major investments. And if alternatives are adequately considered and eliminated during the planning process, taking into consideration a full range of factors, they will not need to be reconsidered again in project development. Thus, the overall planning and environmental process can be streamlined because analyses are only done once. The MIS requirement is designed to be extremely flexible. The planning regulations establish only a general framework within which state and local agencies can design the study that fits their particular situation. Throughout today's broadcast, we will be saying no one size fits all over and over again. FHWA and FTA expect that each study will be custom tailored to fit the decisions that are to be made, the kinds of choices available, and the information expected by decision makers in that particular case. The bottom line is this. MIS is part of the regional metropolitan planning process. It evaluates transportation choices at a quarter or sub-area scale. It reconciles a number of new and existing federal requirements that have been on the books in a way that we think streamlines the process. Most importantly, MIS is a tool to help state and local policy makers collectively reach informed decisions on major projects for a metropolitan area's long-range plan. We think that those decisions will be better ones because they will be emerging from a multimodal planning process. Thanks for that overview, John. We're ready to take your questions now, so please call in. Our number is 1-800-303-6789. And while you're getting to the phone, I'm going to go ahead and ask Don the first question to get things started. Don, let's say that I represent an MPO, and we've completed our long-range plan. And we have put together all of the projects that normally come out of a long-range plan. And there are a number that have been there for a long time. How do we decide, and who should decide, if we need to do an MIS? There's a couple of situations, Nancy, that present themselves. Let's assume, for the sake of this discussion, that the project or the group of projects that you mentioned are, first of all, of a magnitude that they would be considered major. And let's further assume that federal funding is potentially involved. There's really two situations then that occur. One is we have a pipeline project. There's a project that has started through the project development process. We've embarked on the development of an environmental document. Perhaps a notice of intent has been put in the federal register. That's one situation. A second situation is that none of that has occurred. This may be a project that's been in plans for many years, but has not yet embarked on the NEPA documentation process. In that first situation, where we have what you might call a pipeline project, what the regulation says is that the sponsoring agency, whether it's a state, transit operator, MPO, would consult with FHWA and FDA to talk about what, if anything, ought to be added to the process that's already underway. When the sponsor comes to us, we would ask, well, what do the other partners think about this? So there is a collaborative process underway. But essentially, it's a negotiation on what additional work might be added. In the second situation, where we have a project, again, that's perhaps been on the plan for many years, but hasn't embarked on the major investment process, then the MIS would apply if it meets the definition of a major investment and federal funds are involved. Another part of the answer perhaps is that there are many projects that are sort of in a gray area as to whether they are major or not. The regulation allows a considerable amount of discretion and flexibility in deciding what is major. And again, the collaborative process enters in there. What does the local area, is this major in their minds? And a number of areas have developed procedures that they will go through to help sort out the decisions between the state government, the local governments, transit operators, and so on on what is major. Again, it's collaborative. Great, thanks for that answer. Again, remember please call in 1-800-303-6789. We have received a question by fax and we're gonna go ahead and do that one. This is from Sue in Berkeley, California. Sue asks, are computer network models like EMM-2, TranPlan, and Minutp required as part of the MIS to estimate ridership demand, operating characteristics, and so forth. You wanna tackle that one, Don? Sure, the regulation does not require anywhere the use of computer models. It talks about estimating the benefits of the choices that are available. And those benefits might be expressed in terms of ridership. They might be expressed in terms of improved mobility, improved accessibility, changes in transit ridership, changes in level of service on the highway system. Those kinds of measures tend to lend themselves to that kind of measurement. But as a major investment study is initiated and the collaborative process that we'll be talking about in module two gets underway, the parties need to get together among themselves and talk about what is it gonna take? What do our decision makers need to know in order to make a choice? And then craft a scope of work that may involve modeling. I suspect in many cases, that will be what will be concluded, but not necessarily. Nancy, I might add to that also. I guess if one other area where we'll talk about a little bit later on too, is focusing on the kinds of decisions that we're trying to make. And I think if you go back and look at the kinds of decisions that you're trying to make, if it's helpful that those kinds of tools would help you make those decisions, then I think that would lend itself to saying that you would wanna use those kinds of tools. If the kinds of decisions you're looking for are not the kinds of decisions that would be made more viable by those kinds of tools, then you would not necessarily have a need for those. Great. Sue, we hope that answered your question, and we hope you'll call in later with another one if you have one. We do have a caller online with us, Jerry from Connecticut. Please go ahead, Jerry. Yes, this is Jerry McAfee from the Connecticut T-Square Center, and where I'm calling from the Windsor site. My question has to do with what are the specific criteria for defining a major project? Is there a dollar amount or specifically what is it? All right, Jerry. I think, Don, you talked about that briefly in your comments. You wanna give a little more detail? Very briefly, we can talk a little bit more, perhaps. The regulation, as I said, is flexible. It talks about a major project being one of substantial costs, and it has significant share benefits level, service benefits, mobility benefits at the sub-area or corridor scale. And that essentially is the umbrella statement. We do have some examples offered in the regulation, but they're offered as examples. A mile or more of a limited access principal arterial, for example, is offered as an example. A mile or more of a rail facility if it has substantial costs. But we don't put any specifics there to say that there's a threshold amount that, whether it's $50 million or that. We steered clear from that because we didn't wanna be prescriptive in the regulation. We wanted to be offering a framework within which the state and local governments can develop a process that meets their needs. If I can add to that, Nancy, I think one of the things we were looking for was a way of approaching this that would allow for the customizing of this whole process to meet local circumstances. And we had a number of people suggest the possibility of dollar thresholds and even perhaps specifying more specifically the kinds of projects that would be subject to an MIS. And we found two problems with that. One, it would presume that you already knew the outcome of the MIS before you even started. And in fact, we're looking to solve a problem and evaluate alternatives and pick the right one. So if you're not starting with an answer, you can't perhaps establish or identify the absolute criteria. The other thing is that a $10 or $10 million threshold in one part of the country would be insignificant were in another part of the country $100 million or $100,000 million might not really get at the question of what's the right size or what's the right threshold. So rather than specify an absolute threshold, we emphasize the process of collaborative decision making that would be based at the local level to emphasize the application based on local circumstances rather than some pre-established perhaps arbitrary standard. All right, thanks. Jerry, we hope that answered your question. We have another caller online, Bob from New York. Please go ahead with your question, Bob. Thanks, this is Bob Brackman. My question is, who is the final arbiter of whether or not an MIS is required? Who makes a decision if it's a major investment? Nancy, let me pick that one up and follow on. The most popular question, I think, in a number of sessions that we've done around the country is who has the hammer? To come back to the point I was making a moment ago, we really tried to put that whole question at the local level. It's a consensus-building collaborative process, something we're going to talk a bit more in module 2 later on, but the key here is to make that decision locally amongst the key players that are involved and have the best information, the State Department of Transportation, the MPO, the transit operator, the field offices of the Federal Transit Administration and Federal Highway Administration. These are the folks that understand the local circumstances best, and they're the ones that have to take a look at this process and make the determination as to when an MIS is necessary, the scope of the MIS, the methodologies involved, and so forth. Whenever you want to add anything to that, is that cover? I think that covers it. I know a number of states have been working on this already in Pennsylvania. DOT, for example, has met with, it appears to us, virtually all of the MPOs within the state of Pennsylvania and developed a rather lengthy report on these are the projects that were considered for MIS consideration. These are the ones that were finally selected, and then that was shared with the Federal Agency. I know that states are going through that process now. All right. Thank you, Bob, for your question. We appreciate it. Please remember to call in 1-800-303-6789. Our next call is from Bill in Michigan. Bill, please go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Bill Rickwick from Michigan DOT. I would like a little more discussion on the Federal sign-off at the planning stage, just exactly what is the form of that sign-off that we're going to take, and will that include the agency's EPA, Federal Highway, Fresh and Wildlife, Corps of Engineers, and exactly will that sign-off entail? All right. I think we'll give that one to Sheldon. Appreciate the question, Bill. It's one we get asked often. First, the federal government does not have a sign-off at the plan stage. We do not approve metropolitan plans, and we do not approve the MIS. What we do is participate in the process of the MIS in this collaborative fashion that I talked about a moment ago, and hope in that way to identify the key interests and concerns that we have, and contribute those to the consensus-building process that the MIS represents. Through that, we can apprise local players of the concerns that we might have that might tie back to the point Don made a little while ago about the environmental documentation process, which ultimately we have to look at also. So what we're trying to do is participate early, but without sitting there in a final sign-off fashion and saying, we're going to approve this or it doesn't go forward. We're going to participate, collaborate, and become a partner in that process to help serve all of the interests of all of the parties effectively. Let me follow a little bit, too, Sheldon. And Bill, you mentioned quite a few of the resource agencies in your question, and that's also some of the concerns that we get when we have presented the course around the country and so forth. And I think from the standpoint of a sign-off, we're not really looking for a sign-off, but if you're going to hear one word today over and over again and maybe overuse is the word collaboration, and I think to draw a little distinction with that word collaboration versus what we've previously used as coordination, we're really looking for an emphasis on the two-way communication, if you will, so that the collaboration with those agencies hopefully will help us build consensus and the trust building so we don't need any sort of, quote, unquote, official sign-off, but it's more in terms of trust and how we proceed with the decisions. Thanks, and thank you for that question, Bill. Again, we would like for you to call in with your questions or don't forget the FACTS line, which is 908-445-0324. Our next caller is Ed from Richmond. Go ahead with your question, please. Yes, my question has to do with the congestion management systems. The congestion management systems require an analysis similar to the MIS. Can this analysis be used instead of the MIS? I think that's a question for Sheldon. The process of the congestion management system is intended to help evaluate alternatives and identify potential improvements in response to problems that the system also identifies to improve the performance of the transportation system in the metropolitan area. It could be the beginnings of an indication that an MIS is possible in return. The MIS can serve as a vehicle for actually doing the analysis suggested by the indication that there is a lack of performance. And so the relationship is reciprocal. The CMS can identify the possible problem. The MIS, if it's a large enough issue, could do the analysis and consider the range of alternatives to improve the performance of the system. And as a consequence, help identify the preferred alternative that then could go into the plan at a later point in time. So it's a reciprocal relationship in which the two requirements work together. And indeed, in non-attainment areas, provide an opportunity to address the issues associated with single occupant vehicle capacity. You very much work together, as Sheldon said. The idea is not to have redundant requirements, but to have mutually supporting requirements that operate concurrently and together because there's a lot in common between the two. We've seen in the state of Florida, for example, where Nancy comes from, they view the congestion management system as the umbrella with major investment studies being one element, perhaps, of a broader congestion management system. Other states look at it just the other way around that the congestion management system is an input to the major investment study. But they work together and they're not redundant requirements. And you can craft that working relationship to meet the local circumstances. This is not the situation where you have to have a box over here and a box over there, but you can create an arrangement that meets the local situation organizationally and, for that matter, jurisdictionally in a way that would be mutually supportive. Thanks, Sheldon. And thank you, Ed, for that question. We do appreciate you calling in. Our next caller on the line is Frank from Minnesota. Go ahead with your question, please, Frank. Yes, from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. MIS talks about evaluating alternatives to a project or to a specific problem. But shouldn't the MIS analysis concentrate on which problem to solve, in particular, as using the example in the video, not what type of car you should buy, but should you buy a car versus a refrigerator? I think that's a good question, and I think it puts the emphasis where it should be placed. It is on the problem and looking at the problem carefully. Sometimes we need to reconsider, in fact, the problem itself and make sure we fully understand it and not treat symptoms of issues, but rather the underlying causes. And I think that's one area where we're all learning in this era of intermodalism that we have more flexibility and greater opportunities to look at new approaches where we haven't had them in the past. I think from a transit point of view, we're looking for complementary working relationships with highways and vice versa. It's not highways versus transit, but what's the best mix or set of alternatives that solves the problem? And the MIS can address not only what the range of alternatives are, but really also whether or not the problem itself is well-specified and whether there is a need to go out and refine that issue and also look at the jurisdictional or geographic issues associated with it, because the problem area from a transit point of view might be different from a highway point of view. What's the most inclusive approach that allows for a consideration of trade-offs and the best mix of alternatives in terms of solving that issue? We've been talking about problem as if problem was a singular thing, that the problem is congestion or the problem is air quality, for example. And in many of the metropolitan areas around the country, many of the corridors that this pertains to, there are several problems that one might be trying to address. And the package of alternative strategies would address each of those to the extent possible and then in making that balancing process at the end to decide ultimately which alternative goes forward, it might be then looking at each of the different components, the different criteria that are representative of those different problem statements to see which combination of strategies or which strategy does the best job on all of those different problems. I think tying that in also to one of the earlier questions we had about criteria for MIS, I think one way to look at MIS would be, again, focusing on the kind of decision. If you need to make a decision and you've identified the kinds of problems which lend themselves to having some sort of a design concept and scope option left in front of you, then I think that is one way to approach from both the criteria standpoint and also from the problem solving standpoint that it's probably telling you that you need to do, if not any MIS, you need to approach it with a process similar to an MIS to arrive at whatever your design concept and scope is. Thanks, Jim. Great question, Frank. You got everybody involved in that one. And now to get some other people involved, our studio audience has been very patient with us this morning so far, sitting still and not asking you any questions. So we're gonna give them an opportunity and take a couple of questions from our studio audience. Who's got a question for us? Yes, sir, in the back row. Please tell us who you are and ask your question. My name is John Jennings. I'm with the New Jersey Department of Transportation and I'm interested in, do we need to do an MIS even when there are not any modal alternatives that are realistic and why do we have to do that? All right, John. Don, you wanna try that one? Sure, the major investment study as we discussed in the opening is focused on decisions on design, concept and scope. In many situations, there will be transit alternatives and highway alternatives and combinations of highways and transit alternatives that will lend themselves to a multimodal study. Certainly there will be other corridors where transit doesn't make very much sense and corridors where highway improvements don't make much sense. It may be very impractical in a dense urbanized area, New York City, for example, to do too much on the highway side of a major investment type of a project and in those situations, one would look at transit. But let's think about what the definition of design, concept and scope is. It is not just, is it a transit project or is it a highway project? It's the number of highway lanes. Is it, it might be, should this be a heavy rail line, a light rail line, how long should it be? What are the termini and so on? It's not strictly a modal choice that MIS is focused on. It's reaching, getting to those decisions on what does this project look like? I think the other thing that you have to take a look at is how do you know? I mean, in some cases we tend to think that we have a complete answer because we take a look at a facility and we see the performance of that facility and we say that we have to fix the facility. If we took a broader look at it and tried to look at the source of the demand that's making that facility not perform, we might find that there may be other alternatives entirely to just simply fixing that facility. That could be non-capital intensive even. The issue is identifying the problem correctly, making sure that you need to take, that you've looked at all the alternatives effectively and making the best choice. I think the other footnote I'd add to that and something we'll talk about more later is that the study may not have to be the same scale. I mean, we're not trying to identify a simple, single, straightforward, methodological approach for all of these things. You can craft the methodology to fit the circumstance and the problem. So it may not take an awful lot to confirm that there are no alternatives and indeed that you've got the most viable solution to the problem if you've got the problem identified correctly. Thank you and thanks John for that question. We do have a caller online but we are gonna take another question from the audience before we go to that. There was a question in the front row I think. Yes sir. Don, I believe you identified that the MIS could be seen as a repackaging of a lot of the existing planning procedures. That could lead to the conclusion that MIS will replace instead of be in addition to the existing procedures. Could you point to some planning procedures that it will replace? Certainly from FDA's perspective I could point to the alternatives analysis process. For many years required essentially a step between planning and project development on the transit side if someone was planning a fixed guideway, a busway, a light rail line, something of that sort. With MIS we're covering those same kinds of choices and developing information on those choices as a part of the planning process. We've streamlined the process for FDA's perspective. In the past there were methodology reports and results reports and definitions of alternatives reports that were sent in for FDA to review and concur in and bless moving on to the next step. MIS replaces all of that with a much more flexible streamlined process. Far less federal prescription tailored again to the situation at the local level. I think from our side in the highway tradition what it does is take some of the things we've traditionally done in the project development process and bring them earlier into the planning process. We've always traditionally started environmental analysis as Jim will elaborate on in a few minutes at the project development stage after a long time of having confirmed ideas of what that project's going to be. By doing this earlier when we have the flexibility to avoid, mitigate, to more flexibly look at the answers to problems, we avoid some of those controversies that develop around particularly large scale improvements which tend to generate controversy and perhaps deal with them earlier and avoid the stalemates that emerge when you get into the courts and so forth. There's no guarantee we'll eliminate those things but perhaps by providing an opportunity for earlier ownership and involvement will at least mitigate some of them. Jim would you add anything to that? I think the only thing I might add is that I think that's an example of one of the cases or one of the areas where we have in the past come under criticism where we may have defined a project and then been accused of going through whatever process we're going through whether it's the planning process or the project development process or the NEPA process in a manner that we're simply validating the decision that was already made. And I think the MIS really gives us a chance to reinforce a lot of the principles that we had in NEPA and some of the planning processes to go back and legitimize, if you will, some of the decision making that goes on by taking it under consideration at the appropriate time when we do have those alternatives. Thank you, thank you for that question. It was a good one. Don't forget to call us 1-800-303-6789. Our fax number is 908-445-0324. We do have a caller on the line and we have several faxes we've received. We're gonna take our call and then take some of these faxes and then back to our audience to see if they have some more questions. Our caller on the line is Joni in Kansas City. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. My question has to do with how to handle parallel MIS corridors where one of the corridors may be like almost parallel. The background on this is that many urbanized areas have multiple MIS studies going on at the same time and the studies are probably being done looking at highway and transit solutions to transportation problems. Then, during the study process, somebody notices there's a commuter rail or a freight rail line that would be perfect for commuter rail and that particular line may be parallel partly to where the other MIS study is going on. So what strategies should the local entities take to determine whether or not an MIS is necessary or if it should be connected to an expanded ongoing MIS or other options? Thanks, Joni. One of the terms that we have taken care to define in our training course is what is a corridor? And like many words that we have encountered, there are different meanings to words like corridor for different people, different agencies, they have different definitions of those terms that they're coming to us, coming to this process with. In talking about quarters and sub-areas in the regulation, the idea was a rather broad area that includes the facility, perhaps it is the problem to begin with, but also areas around that facility that might include other alternatives and also areas around that include the origins of the trip and the destinations of the trip so that it's a rather broad definition of corridor. It's certainly not limited to an existing right of way, it's much broader than that. Now, the situation that you've described, Joni, perhaps is answered by saying that those alternatives all might be merged into one MIS. I can't tell from what you've offered whether that's the situation or not, but you might want to think about whether this is one corridor and the facilities are competing with each other for the same kind of demand and there's trade-offs to be made between improving one or making improvements to the other or perhaps they're operating independently and in that case, perhaps two studies would be an appropriate way to approach this in a simple way. I think an example from your part of the country might be in the case of St. Louis where they've been working on transit and highway improvements in the metropolitan area independently for many years and by virtue of the change under ICT or recognizing that the flexibility to consider the interrelationship between modes is now a very important strategy, particularly to deal with scarce resources. In that case, they're beginning to see, for example, that in the case of East St. Louis, that the crossing of the river to serve that area with transit may have provided a short-run alternative to increasing highway capacity and essentially the same corridor. The local officials being cognizant of that are trying to take that into account and deal with those relationships directly through the kind of MIS process we've been talking about. Thanks, Sheldon, and that's a good lead-in for our first facts question by using an example. This one asked for an example. This one is directed to you, Don. It's from a cell in my home state of Florida and she asked if you would briefly share with us an MIS process that in your view is meeting your vision of what an MIS should be? It's a difficult question because each one is different and our vision of what an MIS should be is not as specific that you could say, this one clearly meets that. It's meeting our expectation if it's being used to look at alternative strategies that make sense and developing information that decision makers are wanting to have in order to make a choice. Certainly within Florida there are good examples of people who are using the MIS process to make multimodal trade-offs as Sheldon was explaining. SEL, I'm sure, is acquainted with a multimodal quarter study in Miami, the east-west quarter, that perhaps in my terms is the mother of all intermodal projects because it involves a connection between the airport, downtown, and the seaport and it deals with commuter problems going to downtown and back during the day. It deals with moving people from the airport to the seaport who are going on cruise ships. It involves students going back and forth to school and includes people who live on the beach, Miami beach, and who are perhaps transit dependent and need to have improvements in their needs. And through this study, highway options, transit options, commuter rail connections, connections to the airport, connections to the seaport, freight movements are all being considered and perhaps a model of intermodalism. I think one of the hard parts of that question is the term good, partly because we're still relatively early in this whole process. We had so many ongoing improvements that were in the pipeline, as Don referenced earlier, that our emphasis in the short run has been on taking a look at making sure we move those through without unduly penalizing them because of a recent change in the regulations. And it's only now that we're beginning to see the startup of new approaches starting from scratch with regard to the MIS. And the example Don has given for Miami is one, we've seen others in places like Denver and even some others in Florida which are not on the same scale perhaps that we'll talk about later. But the key is we're only just now beginning to see some of these brand new MIS approaches emerging and we haven't had enough experience to fully generate all of the parameters of what a good MIS is. I guess in the end it's whether or not it works for the local area and whether or not it produces the best transportation investment for that area. Another point I might make is that another common theme that will be stressed today is the no one size fits all. So frankly even as we've gone around the country and done workshops or we've been involved in the course presentation, the three day course presentation we've been a little bit careful about over providing examples because we do want to make sure that the message is that no one size fits all. And sometimes by providing an example it becomes a cookie cutter and that's one of the things that we're trying to avoid in this case. It's nice to have examples from time to time though so you have somebody to draw on some other resources maybe people to refer to in various places around the country about what some of their successes have been for those of us who are just getting started in some other studies. I understand we have a number of colors who are holding on the line. They have gotten ready. I guess we've generated some interest in this particular part of the topic. Our first caller is Mike from North Carolina. Please go ahead Mike. Thank you. The first question I have, I have two questions. One is short, would you define partially controlled access? I think that might have a localized definition as well as a national definition but I think it's really secondary to the concern with whether or not you're talking about a particular facility that might be an alternative under consideration within an MIS. In a lot of cases the examples we provided in the regulation tend to catch people's attention and they tend to focus on that and say, oh what we're working on is a partially controlled facility and therefore we need to do an MIS. What we wanted to emphasize in particular in area we could have clarified perhaps in retrospect is the sense that those examples are just that, examples. And as a result, if the alternatives that could be considered to solve the problem that you're looking at include amongst them these kinds of alternatives that are examples in the regulation, then you probably have an MIS that you're going to do. The local decision making process that consensus building collaborative effort will make the final decision as to the application. But the key here is not so much the absolute precision of the example but those are indicators that there may be a problem sufficiently large in scope with potentially high impact, high cost alternatives under consideration than an MIS should be done. Specifically when we use the term partially controlled access as I recall the concept and this would apply to principal arterials was that all principal arterials are not always limited access. In fact, some principal arterials have continuous access with curb cuts and so on. And so we were sort of splitting the difference there saying if there is access for other public streets perhaps signalized intersections that aren't grade separated then that would be partially controlled. If this particular arterial principal arterial has curb cuts and commercial development and so on in our mind that was not partially controlled. Great, thanks. Mike, before we take your second question I think actually we're going to go on to another caller. We do have a number of people waiting on the line and we only have about 10 more minutes left in this session to take your questions. If we aren't able to answer your question during this segment, if you want to go ahead and fax it into us again our number is 908-445-0324. We'll try to get it in later on the show. It may not be pertinent to the particular topic we're talking about but if we have time to fit it in we're certainly going to try to do that. We do have Steve and Beaumont on the line. Please go ahead, Steve. Yes, thank you. This is Steve Payne and I'm with a Turner caller in Brayden. My question is would somebody please address the relationship of the MIS public involvement process with the public involvement process for long range planning activities? I think that's a question for Sheldon. Good question, Steve. The foundation for the public involvement process with regard to a major investment study is the metropolitan public involvement process that already exists. That does not mean that that is the process that would be used but rather that that's the point of departure. The specific public involvement process that would be utilized during the MIS would be crafted, constructed, built to meet the circumstances. If you've got a very large scale set of alternatives with potentially controversial concerns raised you might want to have a more elaborate more complicated process. If you've got a relatively smaller MIS issue with a relatively small range of alternatives might be controversial perhaps but perhaps not as controversial as my first example then you may not need as elaborate an effort. The idea is to custom tailor the public involvement process for a specific MIS to those circumstances starting with the principles and concepts utilized in the metropolitan planning process that's in that area to begin with. Thank you Sheldon and thank you for your call Steve. We have about five more minutes left in this segment. We're gonna go to a call from Charles and Boise. Go ahead please Charles. Hi, thank you. First of all you had us all chuckling a little bit with your video clip that said that the MIS would not cause any additional work. I have a question in terms of the strength or consideration given to the regional plant as you move into the MIS phase. Basically if during the regional plan a decision is made approved that transit would not be a major part of the transportation system and you move into the design phase you end up with roadway suggestions an MIS project arises and then people say okay well now we want transit to be considered as an option in this corridor. How often do you have to revisit the basic assumptions in the regional plan? Charles we actually weren't laughing at your question it's just when we viewed the video yesterday we had the same reaction you did to that particular point. I think Don wants to handle that question for you. Yes I'd like to because we, that jumped out of us as we were watching the video yesterday as well. The, and I know as I said in my opening remarks that for many of the states and metropolitan areas what we're talking about with MIS is something that's new and different. We certainly think we have streamlined the project I know from the transit perspective we have streamlined the process a good bit. So on average across the country perhaps there is a leveling out of the degree of effort but certainly in some situations there is more work to be done than occurred in the past. With regard to your question about revisiting basic assumptions it's part of the vision that we've laid out all of the parties would get together as the problem is being defined as early in the planning process and get some sense of what types of solutions might be appropriate for consideration in this particular corridor and all of those alternatives would then be put on the table. If there are major investment type solutions then an MIS would be the vehicle, the tool in order to sort through those. The idea is that all of those would be on the table and sorted through a decision would be made. Project development would then proceed on whatever the selected project would be. Your question suggests that someone comes in later. Project development is underway on a particular project and someone is now suggesting alternatives. That is going to happen. We hope that the structure that we've laid out will give everyone an opportunity to come to the table early on and suggest that whatever it is that's on their mind be studied but undoubtedly there will be people coming back later on. If we've done our job in the MIS process and have considered a full range of alternatives, at that point in time when this person appears on the scene and suggests some new alternative, hopefully you'll be able to refer back to the earlier studies and say, well, that's a good suggestion and in fact we considered that back two years ago when we were doing our corridor study and this is what we found and that would be enough to then put that aside. Certainly if they come forward with some new alternative that hasn't been considered a different answer would be needed. Thanks, Don. And thank you, Charles, for that question. We are running short of time in this segment. We have time for probably one or two more questions. Jim from Florida is on the line. Go ahead, Jim. This is Jim Kimber in Orlando, Florida. I have a question. If an MIS along an interstate highway covers multiple MPO areas that have different viewpoints that would prevent the consensus in the decision-making process, how does that affect the process of the other MPO? I think that's a question for Sheldon. Jim, we're sitting here chuckling in part because when we were preparing for this telecast yesterday Nancy was sharing that kind of example with us and the only answer we could give her at the time was that we needed to have the local folks work together and coordinate with one another to come to closure. And I think that's the kind of circumstance that at times causes people a lot of stress to say the least because they would like somebody to bring closure for them if they can't do it themselves. And yet in the end, if a decision is going to stick, it'll stick best if the people involved in it find a way to accommodate one another and reach a point of consensus that they can mutually support, not by having an outsider come in and impose some decision on them. And that's the point that we're trying to stress. This coordination among the key players early to identify those issues and come to a decision that will last through the long haul. I guess we lost Gene somewhere. How about we take a fax instead? This one comes from the University of Kentucky from Richard. Is there a requirement to implement demand management strategies identified in the MIS process? Don or Sheldon? Well, if the demand management strategies, in fact the output of the MIS and it's included in the planning tip, I would assume that the local folks have made a commitment to implement it as the preferred alternative to solve the problem that they've identified. In that sense, I think it is the key. And if it was a part of or an alternative that was under consideration with investment capacity increases to begin with, and it didn't make the grade and it didn't survive as the best solution to the problem that was underway, then it isn't the answer and it may not have to be implemented. If it's a mixed outcome of partially demand management and partially new capacity, then we would assume that that met some local need and some local problem and it would be implemented because it helped to solve a local issue. It would also be likely to be implemented. So the notion of implementation here is not, and required implementation, is not because someone said you had to do it, but rather because it solved the problem of met a local need. And this is an issue we see a lot because everyone assumes that an MIS has to always lead to a major investment in new capacity. There's an argument that Jim and I get in too often and we agree to disagree sometimes, but the key here is we may not need to have an investment in all cases. Thanks, Sheldon. Rumor has it, Gene is back on the line in Chicago. We apologize for the earlier problems. Gene, go ahead with your question. Morning. This is Eugene Ryan with the Chicago Area Transportation Study. My question is in developing the Regional Long Range Transportation Plan, it becomes recognized that one or more corridors or areas might need a major investment. But as the major investment studies are not yet done, how do you reconcile the financial constraint and conformity requirements of the long range plan with the fact that you don't have the information that you would when the MIS is finished? I think Don will take that question. I'll take the first stab at it. We anticipated that as we were putting the regulations together. Undoubtedly there will be urbanized areas that have a number of major investment studies that they have recognized that they need to undertake. Those will be staggered out over time and it will be some time before all of those are completed. What we thought in writing the regulations would be a workable approach would be to make some sort of an assumption, a working assumption to put into the plan. Not a decision, certainly not a policy call that a particular technology, particular design concept and scope would be implemented. But as a working assumption to put in something that is a placeholder and then that could be run through the financial analysis, run through the conformity analysis to see if the plan works with that placeholder. Obviously when the MIS is then done, that assumption would be revisited. But that would at least keep the place, keep the money in the financial plan set aside for that particular quarter. I think this is also one of the reasons why we had to invent the major investment study requirement. Under the Clean Air Act and under IST there were two requirements there that make it difficult to proceed with proposed improvements unless they come from a conforming plan and tip. And the question is how do you make a consideration or trade off amongst alternatives which while you haven't, when you haven't decided on what the best alternative is that you can put in a plan and tip. You do it through a planning level study and not a preliminary engineering or project development level study which is specifically prohibited under the Clean Air Act unless it comes from a conforming plan and tip. So in order to make this process work where you have circumstances like you identified Eugene what we're trying to do is say as a planning level activity which is exempt you can consider alternatives, you can pick the best one and at that point put it in a plan and tip. And it would go in the plan and tip only when it could stand the test to both financial constraint and air quality conformity. Thanks Sheldon. And thank you Gene for that question. We did run over a little bit of time on module one so we're gonna move right into our second module. We do appreciate your participation. We thank you for the great questions. The ones that didn't get asked that were sent in by FACTS I have those up here with me and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to get to those later in our program. Again, let me remind you before we start session two of our phone number 1-800-303-6789 for your calls the FACTS number is 908-445-0324. We're now ready to begin our second module and Sheldon Edner's gonna cover collaboration and MIS decision making. Sheldon. Thank you Nancy. I think I already have covered half of my presentation but I'll go ahead just in case we have some late dial in type folks. I'd like to pick up on a number of themes that we've already talked about both in our Q's and A's and also in the videotape and in Don's earlier presentation. I wanna emphasize in my comments the importance of collaboration as a key part of the MIS process and also the fact that it's a continuous effort. It doesn't just happen once and only once in the entire stream of decisions which have to be made. And the reason for emphasizing it is the fact that what we're trying to lead to in the end through the MIS process is improved decisions. Decisions that'll stand up, that'll anticipate issues and that may in fact lead to streamlining of the whole decision process as a consequence. And we're focusing here in particular on the potentially high cost, high impact types of projects. The alternatives or solutions to problems that tend to generate the most controversy. And so we're not looking at all improvements in a metropolitan area but just the larger scale ones. Part of the reason for the emphasis on collaboration comes from the ICT itself. The whole issue of intermodalism which is bringing the modal supporters and advocates together to take a look at ways in which they can advocate not only their particular approach but mixed approaches and solutions to problems where we're not looking for an answer that may not fit the issues. Another factor is the financial flexibility under ICT and the fact that funds don't have to be spent on highways or transit but can be moved around allowing local decision makers to make the best use of a scarce resource. And finally is the emphasis in ICT on the cooperative planning process and the need to bring together in an effective decision effort state DOTs, MPOs and transit operators to make the best decision with regard to the investment of resources. Another fundamental reason for why collaboration is important is the whole basic concept of good planning practice which integrates and relies on an informed understanding of environmental considerations and principles. An issue that FHWA and FTA have been supporting for a long time. We believe that under that framework early and effective involvement of key stakeholders will help identify key issues, will help open the process and provide for an early consideration of potentially difficult questions. Will help anticipate the need, the identification of needed resources to make the ultimate investment successful. Will build support and consensus which will more effectively see whatever investment is decided upon through the implementation process. Will help identify reasonable options and fundamentally structure a decision process which will meet the needs of the local area. And in the end as a consequence lead to a streamlined effective decision process. As Jim said earlier in his comments, one size does not fit all. So collaboration is a key factor in helping all of that come out and play out in a given metropolitan area and through the major investment study process. There are several points in which collaboration is specifically applied. Let me identify them for you and then work through them individually. One is in fact in the need to do a study, an MIS, whether or not one is necessary and when to initiate that. Designing the study itself is subject to the collaborative process. Conducting the study is subject to collaboration and each of the subsequent steps after the completion of the MIS will in one way or another rely heavily on a collaborative effort of key players. And so as a result we are stressing the need in order to make this work effectively in a local area for all of the key stakeholders to have an effective stake in the whole process. As I'd like to use this first graphic on the screen in front of you to illustrate, this whole process starts with the MPO, the transit operator and the state DOT, any of which can convene a meeting to determine when and where an MIS might be necessary. FHWA and FTA are key partners in that process and play a role as we indicated earlier in determining when and where the requirement applies. Although any of these players can convene the process, it in effect the outcome as a product of their joint involvement. This meeting should review the nature of the problem under consideration, not necessarily to justify a project but to make sure that what the alternatives are that can be considered effectively deal with the problem. To indeed identify the alternative and to determine whether or not the alternatives under consideration meet the definitions indicated in the regulations of high type, high impact, high possible cost or federal funding. And finally this conclusion on the determination of federal funding is important because in the absence of potential federal funding there isn't a need to do an MIS and so the key players who might seek to fund an improvement with federal funds need to in effect agree that they will or will not use federal funds in this process. As we move to the next graphic, I wanna emphasize that this initial collaboration is only beginning and is intended to help identify the key issues associated with the determination of the need for an MIS. Once an MIS is identified and the need is identified, there are a whole series of subsequent decisions which must be made which may involve an array of additional participants. The beginning decision is timing. There is no absolute need to move ahead with an MIS immediately upon identifying the need to do one. It could be postponed into the future to meet certain forecasts that may suggest the need but not until certain trends play out. So it could be done tomorrow, it could be done five years from now. The other issue that has to be developed and looked at is who else should be involved after the timing decision is made. It could extend to a whole new cast of characters who were traditionally involved in some respects but often late in the process. By bringing them in early, we may in fact identify ways of dealing with their issues in an earlier fashion. The air quality agencies, permit and resource agencies, economic development agencies, housing and other agencies we've traditionally dealt with late in the process from at least the highway side may be an earlier kind, may be subject to earlier involvement. Someone asked earlier about the public involvement process, the public is a key stakeholder in the outcome of an MIS and ought to be involved early and continuously throughout the MIS process. As I indicated in response to an earlier caller, it builds from the existing metropolitan planning process and associated public involvement requirements in terms of designing to fit the unique MIS. The initial process also needs to review and confirm the analysis that may already been done that may have indicated the need to do an MIS and assess the purpose and need that have already been identified, confirm the boundary of the study area to be looked at and assured that the range and reasonableness of alternatives is adequate and appropriate including whether or not a non capacity alternative should be considered. This collaborative process should rely also or focus also on reviewing and confirming the appropriate methodology to be used. There is no one standard methodology required of every MIS. There is no one set of alternatives that has to be addressed by every MIS. It is built to fit and size to the local area. And in doing that, the local folks need to determine what information they'll need, what criteria for making decisions they will apply and the key issues that they have to address. They also need to identify the products and reports to be produced to support and document the conclusion of the MIS. There is no standard federal format for the MIS but there is a need to document the outcome so that in subsequent decision processes including the environmental process, appropriate consideration to the preceding analysis can be given and avoiding duplication can be achieved. We addressed earlier the issue of the CMS and how it relates to the MIS. It's a mutual and reciprocal relationship intended to avoid duplicating these requirements. They work together not independently. There's a need to determine how to address environmental issues and principles and how the documentation for environmental issues will be undertaken. And last but not least, a subject dear to everyone's heart how to fund the study. Agency participation can be diverse and need not fit a single model. There may be a number of approaches and a number of sources of funds utilized. And it's up to the local participants to determine whether to use only planning funds, to use capital funds or other options and how to handle programming those options in terms of the unified planning work program and the tip. Collaboration is also important throughout the conduct of the study process itself. Sharing in the analysis, sharing in the review of products in interim products, recycling and repeating steps where necessary, reviewing products and ultimately identifying the preferred alternative at the design concept and scope level Don referenced earlier. The intent being to place it in the plan and tip in the metropolitan area. Which leads me to the subsequent steps that follow the MIS. Once the preferred alternative has been identified, we need to revisit the metropolitan plan where an assumption was placed in the plan in terms of a likely outcome of the MIS. It may simply be a process of confirming that assumption and verifying it and validating it based on the results of the MIS. Where a new option or a new approach is identified, it may require a plan revision. Where a plan update is up in process and a new improvement has been identified in a new corridor, it can be added to the plan at that point. At that juncture, you need to take a look at the issues associated with fiscal constraint and air quality, which may be appropriate in terms of a given metropolitan area. And address other metropolitan wide considerations. One of the reasons for addressing the MIS as a planning study is to avoid looking at project by project improvements, which individually might be fine, but collectively may threaten the overall effective performance of the system. And finally, this process of programming subsequent steps to seek implementation of a project in terms of the preferred alternative and all of these related issues that will ultimately lead to construction, including final environmental work, design, right-of-way, and finally, construction itself. In closing, I want to reiterate the theme and how it approach is important throughout all of this process because you've raised this theme with a number of your questions already. We're looking for improved decisions by early consideration of interested stakeholder perspectives to try and avoid pitfalls and problems that we can anticipate. We want to involve those key stakeholders to improve the overall transportation process by making and building decisions that have support on a broader scale. And ultimately, we want to lead to a process that allows for choices of the best investment strategy or option for a given metropolitan area. What we're beginning to see around the country are examples of that that are emerging at various scales and levels of activity. In Denver, an area that we mentioned earlier, there's a single MIS process underway, which involves three separate studies under a single umbrella contract. Each, the overall methodology has been agreed to by all of the individual players, and each of the key metropolitan area agencies, MPO, transit operator, and DOT is a lead on an individual corridor. They've designed this to work for the Denver metropolitan area. An example from Florida is perhaps not as large in scale but indicates some of the positive outcomes of the MIS at a lesser level, perhaps, but it's just as important. Transit agencies are finding by coming to the table that they're able to participate effectively in subdivision design and development in a way which may make transit service in those areas more effective. By bringing all of the players to the table, we wind up with better decisions for all of the key players. Thank you. Thanks, Sheldon. Many of you have gotten busy with your fax machines while Sheldon has been talking, and we do have at least one caller on the line. Before we get to that though, I do wanna ask you a question. One of the things that you talked about was getting the Federal Highway and FTA offices involved early in the process in terms of trying to decide to even go forward with an MIS and who should be involved and so forth. How practical is that, knowing how many MPOs and MISs there are out there pending in the country and how few Federal Highway and Federal Transit people we actually have out there in the field? I think this is one of the areas where we are still experimenting in terms of effective answers. FTA has recently hired a number of new planners to help add to the talent that they have available to serve this need, but beyond that, there's a need for us and our partners at the state and metropolitan level to explore options. We did not necessarily mean to imply that all of these decisions have to take place at a given meeting physically face-to-face in all circumstances, and what we're beginning to see worked out are alternatives that can take advantage of things like the technology we're utilizing today to meet the need of making these collaborative decisions. Other strategies include an example from Pennsylvania where our field office at the division level worked with the state DOT, which worked with all of the individual MPOs and transit operators on a metropolitan area by metropolitan area basis to identify MIS opportunities, confirm a decision, and then produce an overall single report for the entire state. That was shared with FTA for review and comment, and when FTA had reviewed and commented on each of the studies, a conclusion was made to confirm that the choices had been developed appropriately and the key players had been involved, and then as a result, we had a list for the entire state of Pennsylvania of the possible MIS candidates throughout the state. Thanks, Sheldon. This discussion on collaboration in the decision-making process has generated a number of questions and facts first, we're gonna go to Elizabeth in Rhode Island. Please go ahead with your question. Hi, I have a question about the difference between the agency meeting and the public scoping session and what role the public might have in the agency meeting, or is that intended to be a meeting of the types of agency, public agencies that were defined in the discussion? And if you have public at the agency meeting, why would you have a public scoping session, too? All right, sounds like a question for Jim. Okay, Elizabeth, I'm going to assume when you use the word scoping, you're using scoping in the context of our official NEPA scoping, and although I'll cover it a little bit later when we talk about the relationship of NEPA and MIS, we're trying to put the emphasis on, again, the decision-making process and the public involvement process, and I would not say that there's any requirement one way or another, either that the public participate in the agency process or that the agency participate in the public process, but what we're really trying to do is make the process inclusive. So the bottom line is, I think as long as you're involving all those parties and there is good collaboration and coordination, and we are providing follow-up, and follow-up in my mind is something also that I think we have been somewhat weak on in the past in that when I talk about the two-way versus the one-way, sometimes our involvement process is more of an input process, and we don't necessarily do as good a job as we could at following up and getting back to people on what type of consideration is given to their comments and their input. So the bottom line is, I think as long as we're getting that involvement and we're doing it with both the agencies and the public, that's what we're really after. Thanks, Jim, and thank you for that question, Elizabeth. Our next question is from Larry in Indiana. If it has been determined that an MIS is not necessary at a local level, can anyone, for example, the general public appeal that decision? If so, to whom and how would they do that? Let me try to take a stab at that. What we've tried to do is develop a process that will provide for an early and effective consideration of complex and difficult kinds of issues and problems. And we did not wanna do so in a way that created an artificial process with lots of steps and checks intended to stop things from happening, but instead, develop it in a way that would be supportive of the overall regional transportation planning process and allow for effective address and consideration of alternatives at an early stage. To do that, we wanted an open, flexible process. So the MIS is not just a barrier to be utilized to stop things, it's part of an overall stream of activities that leads to the adoption of the metropolitan plan. And I guess the simple answer to Larry's question is that, yes, someone can always object later on and try and raise another issue, but that's not new. Those things happen today, even in the absence of the MIS requirement. What we're trying to do is to minimize the opportunity for people to come from a new perspective, a new opportunity because they've been excluded in the past and they haven't had an opportunity to have their ideas considered. If they're adequately and effectively considered early in the process, then it's easy for the affected decision makers to say, we've addressed that, we've provided you with a response and we've looked at it and in our judgment, it isn't going to work in our metropolitan area or it might work in our metropolitan area and we want to pursue it further. So what we're trying to say is by opening up the process and making it inclusive, we're going to provide people an opportunity to put those issues on the table early in a way that might perhaps reduce the number of last minute good ideas out of the blue. Thanks for sending in that question, Larry. On the phone with us, we have Bill from Orlando. Go ahead, Bill. Thank you. Now my question is, what criteria apply to specifically who or what type of agency should sponsor an MIS? Are you the DOT or NPR or transit agency, always the lead local agency or another agency such as expressway authorities or airport authorities, service elite? The answer to that question is something that has to be arrived at locally in terms of who has the talent, the time and the resources to do the best job of completing the study. There's no absolute pre-determined answer to the question who should do it. It depends. That's one size doesn't fit all response, I guess. And we want to make sure that it's best suited to the local area. So the agencies locally need to work together to determine that and we've seen some areas like Denver and St. Louis and others where they're mixing and matching and we've got state DOTs doing transit type of orientated work, oriented work. We've seen others with the transit operators are looking at a range of things that include highways and what works in terms of who's got the talent is probably the driving force that needs to be looked at. Thanks Sheldon and thanks Bill for that question. We're going to take a question from our audience that they again have been sitting here patiently waiting for us and see who has a question out there. Yes, sir, in the back row. My name is Anupram Gandhi. I'm from the Chelsea Department of Transportation. My question to Sheldon is what happens in the participating agencies cannot agree on what alternatives include in the study on how to analyze them or which one is the best? Who decides? They have the opportunity in effect to decide the answer themselves or to make one another mutually miserable. If they can't come to closure on an issue such as that, it's unlikely they're going to be able to implement any kind of project effectively. There are going to be lots of roadblocks and obstacles. The intent of the MIS is to identify those interests and possible conflicts early enough where people can effectively bargain and negotiate over what those concerns are and maybe find answers to serve those differences of opinion in a way that might eliminate them and not wait till the last moment or the tail end after we've invested months in study and all of a sudden find ourselves in court because we've failed to take into account something. So the intent and the hope is that by doing these things earlier, we can find answers before people get hunkered down in their respective bunkers and won't talk to one another anymore and just send their lawyers to talk to one another. With an early and open process, perhaps we can find a more flexible, more innovative and entrepreneurial process to find answers. Thanks, thank you for that question. We have a caller on the line who has a question specifically for Sheldon Berry from Kansas City. Please go ahead, Barry. Yes, Sheldon, this is Barry Raleigh, HDR Engineering in Kansas City. We're currently about 40 to 50% through MIS in the St. Louis region. You mentioned earlier that it's extremely important getting other agencies involved early. I need to emphasize that as well. It's a major coordination effort. What we're finding is that some of the other regulatory agencies are not aware of the MIS process and they're used to doing things in the old way as a cited issue the same way with the public. You go out to the public and try to inform them of what an MIS is and they get confused as well. And sometimes you have to go back and reiterate to agencies and the public what an MIS is. Has this particular concern been brought to your attention and is there anything, any unique approach out there that you have seen that may address this? I'd like to address your question on a couple of levels and also invite my colleagues to get involved in the discussion. The reason for the teleconference is in part your question. We need to reach out and involve more people and convey information to a much broader audience. I suggested recently to a group if we could get an auditorium that would seat 500,000 people and hold them in one place long enough so that we can finally explain the concept, we might be able to reduce the confusion. This is our answer to the 500,000 seat stadium is an attempt to reach out through this vehicle and it won't solve all of the need to solve this or deal with this issue. We're looking out through a number of different efforts to try and spread the word and get people involved in a way that allows for effective participation and we're experimenting with a number of other approaches and trying to do that through both the MIS training course that was mentioned in the introduction that Linda Howe provided one day sessions and a number of other vehicles to try and do that but we have much more to do and if Jim or Don have any suggestions to add to that I would welcome it. I might mention Barry that we do have some activities at least from the headquarters perspective that we've undertaken particularly to involve the various resource agencies. We have had cascading meetings so to speak with some of the agencies and to name a few EPA and the Corps of Engineers and National Marine Fisheries, Coastal Commissions and so on but the word is slow to get out so I agree with what your perception is we are aware of the problem. Some of the suggestions we've made and for the local level to get people involved is to as you go through your process and the public involvement, the agency involvement is to structure in a way which is friendly to them and by that I mean a lot of times we hear that there's great difficulty in being able to travel regularly so in order to structure some of the involvement you could, you know, I would suggest that the telephone conferences or to bundle packages of studies or projects or the alternatives that are being looked at into one and so that we can help get them engaged but I appreciate the comment because it is something that has been brought to our attention, we are aware of it and we are taking steps but it is a slow process. I think part of the problem too is that people are focusing on the trees and not at the forest that many of the questions that we get that people are confused about is at the minutiae level rather than the grand scheme I think it helps if we keep focused on this is a problem solving exercise it's not any different than buying a car and so on, focus on the decisions what information is necessary to get those decisions made and so on. That said I think that as a part of that MIS is only part of a much broader broader planning process where there's some educational needs on our part and I think on the part of our audience to help inform the public and inform local elected officials decision makers sitting on MPO policy bodies about how this process works I think there's a lot of confusion there as to just what is the role of an MPO policy body what are they supposed to do and so on. The National Transit Institute is undertaking another training program similar to the MIS program dealing with the elected officials sitting on policy bodies and their role in the planning process so you can look forward to that in the coming months. Thank you, good question Barry you got everybody involved we're gonna take another question from our studio audience right here in the front row you have a question. I have a forest question where do land use decision makers fit into this collaborative process? Well they're part of the transportation planning process in the overall sense because that planning process should consider and analyze as appropriate the land use plans for a given metropolitan area so as part of the overall metropolitan planning effort land use factors need to be addressed as you begin to take a look at sub-area and quarter level studies as supplements and part of that process you apply those basic considerations at that level also so land use becomes one of the issues addressed in completing the MIS some answers may in fact lie in land use types of strategies that has been proposed in some areas of the country not many I would admit but has been proposed but the issue is what works what is the strategy best suited for that given metropolitan area and so each area needs to take a look at and consider and analyze as appropriate the land use issues not only at the regional level but also at the corridor and sub-area levels where significant improvements are being contemplated. Thanks Sheldon we have a caller on the line Mark from North Carolina please go ahead with your call Mark. Yes could you tell me what happens if through the collaborative process the key players are unable to reach a consensus or agree on the need for an MIS or if they do the scope of the MIS can you give us any suggestions on how to help reach a consensus? Sheldon? We had a similar question raised earlier Mark let me add to the answer I provided at that point in time I think that the bottom line is still that that would indicate that there's some fundamental flaws in the metropolitan area in terms of the ability to come to closure and consensus on what ought to be done and that the issues aren't technical necessarily but more broadly concerned with policy and programmatic interests that the respective agencies disagree on and they need to address that level of issue as well as the question of what kind of project they're advocating and so it's really gonna take a multiple level effort to try and resolve the differences of opinion. One of the things we have seen in some areas of the country problems that have reflected that lack of opinion of consensus of opinion or transportation improvements that all of a sudden materialize in a given metropolitan area that other agencies weren't aware of or weren't party to in terms of their development and when those improvements are made oftentimes they tend to make the life of those other agencies more difficult and perhaps make the transportation system as a whole more inefficient and ineffective not necessarily serve the overall system performance needs. So what we're emphasizing here is the need for local consensus to be arrived at locally in terms of the key players in terms of what's gonna work best in that area and if there's the kind of conflict you identify in place my suspicion is that any one advocate for a given alternative is gonna have a tough time regardless. Joe. We've been talking about collaboration in the context of MIS but I think what we've been saying applies equally well to the entire metropolitan planning process the same situation occurs in the adoption of a plan and the option of a TIP establishment of policies and priorities. If the agencies can work together toward win-win solutions then everybody is happy but within the planning requirements of ICT there are vetoes scattered about the table so that any one participant can make life miserable for everybody if they so choose. So the challenge is to throughout the process make the collaboration work positively for everybody. Something I guess I might add, Mark, in the way of a suggestion is to make sure that the right questions are on the table at the right time also. I think sometimes when we get into this discussion about whether or not we can reach a consensus many times I think that we have to look and see whether the right questions are being asked and I mean that in a sense of whether we're talking about problems or whether we're talking about symptoms and I think that if we take it in a stepwise approach and be sure we go back to the very beginning and do a good job of problem identification then I think that helps in that consensus-building format and I can give you a very quick analogy if you will about and I'm sure some of you have heard this story before about the two sisters who are arguing over the last orange and their mother simply steps in and cuts the orange in half and gives each one of them half and one goes off and peels the orange, throws it away and eats the meat of the orange so to speak and the other one throws the meat away and takes the rind and cuts it up to make a cake and I think in that case it's an example of not really understanding or communicating what the real problems are and what the real interests are so I think I would suggest to go back and look and make sure that there's been a good identification of that problem also. Thanks for that observation Jim and thank you Mark for that question. We're gonna take one of our facts questions. This is from Tammy in Irvine, California. When studies show that a freeway is needed immediately but transit may be needed 10, 15 or 20 years in the future must a transit alignment and design be identified in the MIS process. Sheldon? You wanna take a stab at that first Don? I want to try and I'll follow that. We're trying to duck this one as well. If you're trying to say that. I think the answer to Tammy's question is what's gonna work best in terms of what their area can afford? There are circumstances where if her question presumes that there's an absolute must do this followed by something that could come a little later but it also is a must do and the issue is what works best in terms of staging that investment? In some cases, the whole question is how do you package that process and solve the problem and funding the overall set of answers is a key factor as part of the discussion and the decision. This is a circumstance where solving at a project at a time might be counterproductive and if both can be looked at as compliments to one another a good overall strategy might emerge. It may be sequencing, phasing, funding, a number of strategies which will allow for doing both at the best time for the entire region. I picked up on the word must too because so much of what we've been saying today is how all we've established is a general framework. There is not federal prescription. So the word must took me back a little bit. But what I hear in the question is a good example I think of multimodal thinking and the need to think short term and long term to think about transit and highways together. Prior to ICT and the process that we've laid out here, conceivably each of those decisions would have been reached independently and perhaps if the highway is needed now that highway would have been built and precluded the option of transit eventually and we would have been worse off for it in the long term and I'm glad to hear that in this particular case people are thinking about both the long term needs and the short term needs, the highway needs and the transit needs and trying to balance them. The North Dallas corridor and the joint highway rail construction might be an example there in terms of a complementary effort to meet an overall need in a given corridor. Thank you and thank you Tammy for sending in that question. We have about five more minutes before we take a break and we do have a caller on the line, Cheryl in Orlando, please go ahead with your question. Thank you and good afternoon. This is Cheryl King from Orlando, I'm with BRW and I wanted to know, how do you use the collaborative process to determine the need for and level of environmental detail to be included in the, in the MIS? Want to start and maybe Jim will jump in. I'm going to start it. Jim's going to finish it in two ways, I suspect, a short answer and then a reference to a module he's going to do later. I think one point is to understand that environmental principles and considerations are going to be undertaken throughout the MIS whether or not you're documenting a study that will be used as a final environmental document or a draft document that we are trying to take a look at dealing with those issues in a way that anticipates and looks at the questions concerned at the right level of detail at the right time. And so part of what the collaborative process has to take a look at is the nature of the problem, the nature of potential key issues that have to be looked at as part of the problem, are there some key resource, public resource issues that are under in the area, are there some 4F lands or are there some other historic resource kinds of questions to have to be looked at and address that as part of the early considerations of environmental concerns to anticipate and develop information necessary to look at how they may impact the final decision. Subsequently, the rest of the effort might play out in the final, the other steps that follow the MIS as we get into more detailed look at locational issues. Jim? I guess I just add, Sheldon, that we are going to talk about this later in Module 4. However, I wanna reinforce that concept about talking about the level of detail in particular because I think the convincing argument is that we're trying to involve the resource agencies and the stakeholders at a point early enough in the process where there can really be an effect on the outcome. I think that's what we've been criticized for in the past is that the metaphor is there's a bunch of people sitting around the table drawing lines on the map and so you've already decided what you wanna do and now you wanna start and go through and collaborate and coordinate with those resource agencies on what kind of impacts are associated with the decisions you've already made. So we're really trying to emphasize that we're moving that consideration earlier into the process and tying that into the kinds of detail that are necessary to make those decisions at that stage of the process. Thank you and thank you, Cheryl, for that question. We have about two minutes before our break. We're gonna take a very brief question and answer from our studio audience and then we're gonna go to our break. Who has a brief question we can answer for you in the audience? Well, then we're gonna take a brief question from a fax instead. One of these questions is, is there an MIS necessary if there are no federal funds involved? Short answer, no. No. No. That may be a little briefer than we needed. We're gonna stretch to fill time. Yeah, stretch. Another question, this one came from the University of Kentucky from Steve Williams. If a decision has already been made locally on a design concept, is there any need to delay things to do an MIS? This may not be your short answer you were looking for. I think what we need to take a look at is what led up to the identification of that design concept and scope and how it emerged and what documentation is available. And if the key collaborative effort of the key agencies involved determines that indeed it has been confirmed and the work that's been done to look at the identification of that option is adequate, then the answer may be no additional work may be done and all you need to do is document that pre-existing work as in fact supporting the completion of the MIS. What we often find, however, is that some of these potential improvements haven't gone through a full range of alternatives. They haven't considered answers to a broad problem. They may have been self-fulfilling prophecies that essentially got developed and without consideration of alternatives got included in plans in a way that may have been counterproductive to a given region. It's up to the local players to look at what's been done, review the work that's been done, determine whether or not it's adequate and if it is document that adequacy and include it in the plan or two. We have lots of examples on the transit side where people embarked on, came to us and said, well, we know what we wanna do, show us how we can do it. And as the process then proceeded, other voices started being heard and other ideas were put on the table. So I think you really, as Sheldon said, have to test that supposition. Maybe the decision has been made but it may be, it may be tenuous. If we have a second, I'd like to go back to the previous, previous question where we were asked about federal funds potentially involved. Just to clarify what we're talking about is federal funds potentially involved in the implementation of a project. It's not federal funds involved in the study. One might be looking at the federal funds eventually. If a study's not being federally funded, that does not have a bearing on whether an MIS is involved. It's the actual construction of the preferred alternative that emerges from the MIS. Thanks for that clarification. I'm sure it will help. Steve, thank you for faxing in that question. We are going to take a break now. We do appreciate your participation. Thank you for sending in your questions and calling in your questions. We're about halfway through. We're gonna take a 15 minute break and we look forward to having all of you back with us in 15 minutes. Thank you.