Shared Planning Resources

The planning requirements for public transit operators and health and human service agencies are markedly different. While FTA-funded public transit agencies are required to provide operational and financial data to FTA on an annual basis, and to participate in the state and metropolitan transportation planning processes, health and human service agencies do not have the same Federal requirements for the transportation they provide. As a result, transit agencies typically have more transportation planning resources, namely staff, devoted to transportation planning and analysis than their health and human service agency counterparts. Transit agency staff also have greater access to sophisticated transportation expertise and analytical tools through their own agencies and, in urban areas, through their local MPOs.

The mechanisms for sharing planning resources can take any number of approaches -- sharing staff, analytical tools, technical abilities, hardware and software, or facilities. In areas where transportation coordinating councils have been established, member agencies typically make technical staff available to work together on the council or at a more detailed sub-group level. Each staff person’s knowledge of their own organization, its existing transportation services, and the clientele they serve is brought to the table. This allows the first and most vital step to occur: information exchange. A number of staff from transit and health and human service agencies reported that once they were brought together with other agency staff, solutions to individual transportation problems were often rapidly addressed when staff from one agency discovered that another agency had a service in place to meet their needs.

In many urban areas, the MPO serves as a forum where numerous state and local transportation agencies come together to share planning resources. The MPO provides transportation agencies with enhanced planning capabilities through their staff and the use of their transportation demand and land use models. These models can be used to compare existing transit and highway facilities against projected residential locations, job centers, or any number of other facilities, including health and human service facilities and to forecast travel demand. While health and human service agencies are not required to participate in the metropolitan planning process through the MPO, their future involvement could serve to further enhance coordination with local transit agencies. Other forums, including local transportation coordination advisory boards, could also serve as a place where agency staff shares information and resources.

The sharing of planning resources can contribute to a coordinated approach to transportation service delivery in a number of ways. The primary planning resources available to coordinate are planning staff, tools, and data from participating agencies. Through sharing expertise, individual agency planners can leverage another agency’s insight, data, and experience in solving transportation challenges. Working with shared information, planners can develop more responsive yet less redundant transportation systems, identify and fill service gaps, and maximize the number of constituents served in a cost-effective manner. Coordinated planning can also lead to implementation of standardized dispatch and other technologies used in delivering transportation services that could enable agencies to integrate and expand services through enhanced communications.

The two following examples illustrate how local agencies have established arrangements to share planning resources, the agencies involved, what resources are provided by each agency, the challenges faced, and the benefits realized. For additional information shared planning resources, please see "Planning Guidelines for Coordinated State and Local Specialized Transportation Services," Checklist of Transportation Planning Steps, Step 5.⁵

A. Phoenix, Arizona - The MPO as a Forum for Sharing Planning Resources

In Phoenix, Arizona, explosive population growth, urban sprawl, and the growth of sizable cities on the outskirts create a significant challenge to providing coordinated transit service to the general public and paratransit riders in Maricopa County. Not unlike other growing cities in the Western U.S., Phoenix is attempting to enhance transit services against a backdrop where transit is not well established, and often times not well funded or supported. One of the key elements to future enhancement of the transit system in general and the paratransit system, in particular, is the sharing of planning resources through the MAG, which serves as the local MPO for the region. The area of the region is over 9,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey. The county includes both rural and urban areas and is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.

In Arizona, the State Department of Economic Security (DES) has established a unique 20-year partnership with local governments, that allows local elected officials to develop recommendations on human services needs in their communities. In the 1970s, the local recommendations were developed by individual human service planners located in the major cities and in the county. Because of obvious common needs across the region and the need to address those needs at a county wide level, a consolidated planning process was developed in 1981 between the local governments and DES which uses the councils of governments and Indian communities to develop these recommendations to DES on the use of a portion of the Federal Social Services Block Grant. Cities agreed to allocate their city-based human service planning resources to MAG in order to enable planners to coordinate human service planning for the region as a whole. Currently, the human service planners at MAG are MAG employees, supported in part by local government contributions and, through the contract, the DES.

The MAG staff also includes transportation and air quality planners. The combination of these planners and human service planners within the same organization enables different expertise to be brought together to provide more comprehensive human service transportation planning. The recent consolidation of MAG offices has brought these staff together into the same physical location, which has accelerated cooperative planning and the exchange of information. Through the MPO and its Human Services Planning Committee, the human service planners have begun to address transportation coordination issues.

Most recently, the impetus for coordination has been to address the welfare-to-work challenge in the county. The mismatch between where welfare recipients reside and where jobs are located is currently exacerbated by the inadequacy of transit service between these locations. The human services and transportation staff have spearheaded an effort to develop an Access to Jobs application for FTA funding, working with members of the following organizations:

• City of Phoenix
• Regional Transit Planning Authority (RTPA)
• Arizona DOT
• Valley Metro (operator of the bus system)
• County Social Services Department

MAG human service and transportation planners are sharing databases on transit services, client location (including Temporary Aid to Needy Families [TANF] recipients), employment location, and human service facilities locations, to develop the underlying analysis for the Access to Jobs application. The planners have employed Geographic Information Systems (GIS) developed with shared data to provide analysis and illustration for the proposal. The proposal includes two projects to enhance the coordination of services:

Working with the multi-agency membership of the MAG Human Service Planning Committee, human service planners have also had some success in securing additional funding available for coordinated transportation services. The Committee worked with other HHS agencies and MPOs throughout the state to lobby the legislature to designate $2 million in TANF funds as eligible for paying for transportation services. Similar to other states, the Arizona legislature determined that transportation was a legitimate, eligible use of a portion of TANF funds. The Committee works with the RTPA to examine the development of a joint dispatching system that would coordinate rides between the seven dial-a-ride systems that currently operate only within their own municipal boundaries. The Committee also works with the County Social Services Department and various non-profit human service providers to coordinate transportation services and develop the underlying transportation networks (primarily fleets and drivers) to service their clients’ transportation needs. According to MAG staff, the collaboration between human services and transportation planners has been an education to both. The ability to utilize the expertise on human service transportation barriers and needs, and transportation expertise on options and possible solutions, has been a valuable combination to assist cash assistance and low-income people in the region.

B. State of Ohio - Sharing Planning Resources to Overcome Obstacles to and Provide Guidance on Transportation Coordination

For more than 20 years, the ODOT has been encouraging transportation coordination in Ohio. Through a combination of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), published guidance, and, more recently, the formation of a Statewide Transportation Coordination Task Force, ODOT has worked with an increasing number of other state agencies to share data and develop shared planning resources to coordinate transportation systems. In one of its first cooperative efforts, ODOT entered into an MOU with the Ohio Department of Aging (ODA) in 1988 to submit a joint grant application to FTA to assess the barriers to transportation for the elderly. The grant led to the development of the DRIVE program, a passenger assistance training program for drivers. Based on this success, ODOT developed an MOU with the Department of Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities (MR/DD) to have planning staff from ODOT work with MR/DD staff to develop a similar program to train drivers in transporting MR/DD clientele.

Coordination between the ODOT and State HHS agencies gained momentum in 1996 when representatives of the ODOT, MR/DD, ODA, and the state Department of Human Services (DHS) attended a transportation coordination and human service delivery meeting held in Chicago, co-sponsored by the regional offices of the U.S. DOT and U.S. DHHS. As a result of the meeting, state participants developed an action plan to form a statewide transportation coordination task force. The Governor of Ohio supported the push for coordination between state agencies; in July 1996 the task force was formed with the four agencies and a representative of the Governor’s Family and Children First Initiative. ODOT established MOUs with each of the participating state agencies to address obstacles to coordination. The task force then sponsored two statewide transportation coordination conferences which were well attended and provided a clear message that local communities were looking for guidance on transportation coordination.

As a result, the task force was expanded to include several other state agencies including:

• Department of Development
• Department of Mental Health
• Department of Education
• Bureau of Employment Services
• Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services
• Rehabilitation Services Commission (RSC)
• Head Start Collaboration Project
• Governor’s Council on People with Disabilities

Members of the expanded task force have come together to share information related to issues with mutual impacts, including: agency-specific state regulatory and policy obstacles, both perceived and real; agency reporting requirements and the types of data available for transportation planning purposes; the establishment of regulatory free zones and regulatory waivers; insurance and liability; and funding distribution. Using funding from a National Governor’s Association (NGA) grant to study coordination and its impact on welfare reform, planning staff from participating agencies on the task force are developing twenty coordination briefs on these and other subjects ranging from liability, headstart transportation, and setting contract rates.

Working closely with members of the Task force, and in response to increasing community requests for information regarding integrating the transportation networks of multiple providers, ODOT developed and updated its "Handbook for Coordinating Transportation Services" in October 1997. The handbook, originally published in 1991, is a step-by-step guide to implementing coordinated transportation systems. Since its original publication, over 1,200 copies have been distributed to transit and health and human service agencies throughout the state. The 1997 update included case studies and testimonials based on ODOT’s experience in working with state and local health and human service agencies. The update also included a "Volume II - A Guide for Implementing Coordinated Transportation Systems" that provides step-by-step instructions and tools for forming new organizations and policies and procedures to implement coordination.

The interaction of planning staff from member agencies on the Task force has already had a significant impact on the way agencies plan for transportation, and their views on the benefits of coordination. The Department of Education recently proposed revisions to their school bus and safety rules that were shaped by their membership on the Task force. As a result of work by the education department’s planning staff with their DHS and ODOT counterparts on issues pertaining to Ohio Works First, Ohio’s welfare reform effort, the proposed revisions now allow school buses to be used for Works First participants. Task force members have also shared information from insurance experts regarding the liability barriers of using school bus fleets in rural areas to provide health and human service transportation. The sharing of information among agencies on the Task force has also led to Ohio’s first agreement to share funds between ODOT and the Ohio RSC. RSC will give ODOT $250,000 to support coordinated transportation as a direct result of the Task force’s work and RSC’s recognition of the direct benefits to be realized through coordination.

ODOT continues to leverage partnerships with state health and human service agencies as it administers the Ohio Coordination Program (OCP), a grant program open to communities working to coordinate transportation. There are currently 13 separate projects funded under the OCP at the county level, with health and human service agencies typically serving as the lead agencies. These projects include:

• efforts to implement a coordinated brokerage concept to eliminate duplication of service, which has led to placing individuals in vehicles with trained drivers rather than agency staff or case managers
• work with local transit agencies to expand services and hours in underserved areas
• Consolidation of maintenance and fueling between a transit and human service agencies.

ODOT is also working with the Task force to jointly review FTA 5310 (Specialized Transportation Program) grant applications with member agency planning staff. Through these partnerships and the exchange of planning expertise, members are better able to remove barriers that prevent successful coordination and to plan for efficient coordinated services.