What is the Congestion Management Process?

Each day, the 853 thousand residents of the Capital Region make 3.2 million trips by auto, transit, walking, or biking, totaling more than 21 million miles of daily travel. Travelling isn’t always smooth – in 2022, traffic congestion added an additional 16.5 million hours of travel time. This congestion results in wasted fuel, wasted time, harmful vehicle emissions, and increased supply chain costs.

The Congestion Management Process (CMP) is a systematic approach to managing congestion using accurate and up-to-date transportation system performance data to identify congestion problems and implement congestion management strategies. A successful CMP offers many benefits to the travelling public by making the regional transportation system safer, greener, more efficient, and improving quality of life for all travelers.

In the 2023 Congestion Management Process Report, the methodology and initial findings of the CMP are presented. The report includes:

• Multimodal congestion performance measures and baseline values for these measures.
• Summary of extensive stakeholder and public engagement.
• Analysis of congestion problems in each county.
• List of congestion management strategies, covering eight categories of approaches to congestion management. Many of these strategies focus on leveraging cost-effective technologies to get the most performance we can out of the region’s transportation infrastructure.
• Policies and procedures relating to integrating CMP findings into the Transportation Council’s upcoming long-range Metropolitan Transportation Plan update and Transportation Improvement Plan update, including identification of potential funding sources and capital programming approaches for CMP implementation.
• Next steps that will be performed as part of the cyclical and ongoing CMP process.

View the full document here: Congestion Management Process Report

What are the Causes of Congestion?

Congestion is also characterized as either recurring (congestion that occurs at a predictable time of day or day of the week, such as the evening rush hour), or non-recurring (congestion that is unpredictable and results from a temporary disruption such as a crash, a work zone, or inclement weather).

Understanding the causes contributing to congestion on each roadway facility, and whether the congestion is recurring or non-recurring, is crucial in selecting effective congestion management strategies.