Transportation for Communities - Advancing Projects Through Partnerships

How does TCAPP work in the real world?

WSDOT uses TCAPP to support Stakeholder Collaboration in Corridor Planning

Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) was one of the agencies selected to participate in pilot testing the collaborative decision making tool "Transportation for Communities – Advancing Projects through Partnerships (TCAPP)" (for more information visit the Transportation Research Board’s project description). The pilot test was to apply the decision making tool to the SR 509 Corridor Completion Project. Using the tools and techniques provided under the TCAPP Corridor Planning protocol, the WSDOT project team worked collaboratively with stakeholders and successfully defined the scope of Phase 1 of the project. The scope reduced the initial project implementation cost by about $400 million while preserving most of the project benefits.

Background
The SR 509 project is "ready to go." Preliminary design is complete and a Record of Decision was issued in 2003. The project’s master plan calls for three lanes (two general purpose lanes and one HOV lane) in each direction with more than eight miles of widening on Interstate 5 to mitigate the traffic brought on by the extension. The project is expected to provide additional access to the Sea-Tac International Airport and the Port of Seattle, provide congestion relief on local arterials and greater opportunity for stimulating economic development. However, with a price tag of well over $1.2 billion and many other competing priorities in the region, several funding attempts from traditional revenue sources to complete the project did not come to fruition.



The state legislature and local partners came to the realization that, to implement this important regional project, they have to search for funding from non-traditional revenue sources such as tolling. With tolling coming into the picture, it brings the opportunity to leverage its demand management effect to scale and phase the project. The goal of this pilot test was to demonstrate how the TCAPP tools could help facilitate the project stakeholders and local partners in defining the Phase 1 scope of the project by taking tolling into consideration.

Through this pilot project, the WSDOT project team found TACAPP to be helpful in many ways. To name a few:

Identify and involve all key stakeholders early on
Following TCAPP’s stakeholder collaboration techniques provided in the Collaboration Assessment the WSDOT project team conducted a thorough assessment of the project stakeholder committees assembled for the EIS development process to determine if the full range of interests and perspectives were represented on these committees. Using the TCAPP tool, the key questions the project team asked in the assessment included: who are the key stakeholders? Who has the ability to stall the project and on what grounds? Based on the assessment, the project team decided to expand the committee membership to include representatives from three new interest groups - freight, local business and residents. Additionally, members of the state legislature’s transportation committees were invited since the legislature is the ultimate decision maker for tolling and funding needed to complete the project. The addition of these new committee members has proven to be instrumental in achieving a high level of consensus on the preferred phasing option.

Building stakeholder consensus around Key Decision Points (KDPs)
The project team found the sequence of corridor planning key decision points as provided in TCAPP to be very helpful. Tailoring it to their unique project situation, they applied the key decision points COR-2, COR-3, COR-4, COR-5, COR-6, COR-8 AND ENV-1 in the pilot test. Each of these KDPs contains information on the purpose and outcomes of the decision point; the roles of each partner; the questions that policy makers must address in order to make decisions; and the data, tools, and technology that may be used to support the decisions. Additionally, TCAPP provides subject specific case studies to help users understand how these concepts can be applied in the real world. This has provided the project team a clear map toward building a project phasing plan that every stakeholder could agree to.

Stakeholder Collaboration Assessment Survey
The project team found the sample surveys available under the collaboration assessment to be quite useful for monitoring the effectiveness of the collaboration process. Using this instrument, they conducted a collaboration assessment survey at the end of each stakeholder meeting. The surveys helped the team and committee members evaluate how well the project was progressing. Using the survey results, they were able to identify and address issues at their early stages before they grew into bigger issues. This too has proven to be instrumental in achieving the final consensus.

TCAPP contains a wealth of information, tools and techniques on how to make planning decisions collaboratively. The information is easy to find and follow because of its stratified structure. Through this pilot project, the project team found it to be very informative and helpful. They believe that anyone involved in transportation plans or projects can benefit from the information and resources provided on this web site.