Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management (2024)

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Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 12 Take Inventory of the Corridor Corridors are often defined by their geography, stakeholders, assets, and liabilities. However, a corridor’s assets go far beyond available right-of-way and the improvements to the land infrastructure (pavements and structures). Likewise, liabilities may go beyond physical or functional obsolescence. Successful corridor management includes consideration of high-value locations and economic assets (natural resources, universities, international gateways, or concentrations of skilled workers). An inventory includes considering liabilities such as poverty, political instability, or scarce funding availability (both public and private equity investments). It is also important for corridor managers to understand corridor liabilities and pain points and missing assets. What should be part of the corridor portfolio that is currently missing? A practical play for assessing corridor assets and liabilities both for the present and future is integral to effective management. The literature search conducted for this project identifies work on corridor infrastructure; however, these attributes include items such as route length, area coverage, and infrastructure density, and work on how to conduct a features inventory of transportation and area land-uses is absent (APP 1, Table 1). The land-use elements in Appendix 1, Table 2 include transportation/land-use integration policy and change prediction. While specific guidance on establishing existing and desired corridor conditions does not appear, there is information on the integration of land-use and transportation planning and examination of land-use changes catalyzed by transportation improvements. Define the Corridor’s Market Area and Planning Time Horizon Defining a Market Area: To inventory corridor assets and liabilities, it is essential to define the universe of space, infrastructure, and economic activity that are considered to be part of the corridor. Defining the market or influence area of a corridor is as much a qualitative as a quantitative process that defies a purely rational approach. The literature is silent on this topic. In the example of the US 54-400 corridor in Andover, Kansas, the definition of the influence area became a political process.5 Andover, Kansas prides itself upon being a lower-density, bedroom community to the Wichita, Kansas MSA. It’s small-town providing living less than 30 minutes from work. The notion of increasing traffic accommodation and development density was anathema. The definition of the corridor influence area was re-framed as a narrow corridor (1,200’ total width) with the connected transportation network to support triple the usual development density. This narrow, dense, mixed-use corridor provides Andover the economic engine to support the lower-density bedroom-community identity elsewhere. The selection of the influence area is essential to the success of a corridor management effort, as the influence area determines the universe of assets that can create value in a corridor as well as the universe of performance liabilities that may be addressed through corridor improvement actions. Based on the full body of case research and literature consulted, Table 1 below summarizes some key considerations for selecting a corridor influence area. 5 Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc, “City of Andover US 54/400 Corridor Study” (December 2011), https://www.andoverks.com/DocumentCenter/View/1294/Andover-US-54-Corridor-Plan-Report. PLAY2

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 13 Table 1: Guidelines for Setting Corridor Market Area Boundaries Defining Considerations Effect on Corridor Influence Area Criterion #1 Proximity: Drive time, truck delivery time, or mileage from/to corridor termini or core infrastructure elements. (Drive time or mileage standard buffer or margin) Minimum: Influence area should encapsulate at least a 30-minute commuting radius of core infrastructure assets, and a 180-minute freight delivery radius (or same-day round-trip radius) of key freight assets or international gateways. Maximum: Influence area should not extend beyond proximity within which freight or passenger trips can reasonably be expected to utilize the corridor. Criterion #2 Jurisdictional Boundaries: Boundaries of cities, states, counties, or other governmental entities that may be valuable as coalition partners, or may have authority to support corridor management efforts. Maximum: Boundary areas should include enough jurisdictions can draw and support more robust coalitions and resources. Minimum: However, unnecessary inclusion of problematic or uncooperative jurisdictions can make the process unduly complicated. Boundaries should include only jurisdictions reasonably expected to (1) experience impact and (2) offer input or resources to the management effort. Criterion # 3 Policy Sensitivity: Limitation of market area to areas that can reasonably be expected to be responsive to corridor improvement strategies. Maximum: Boundary areas should be small enough that effective management tactics can reasonably show a % change in key indicators such as congested VMT, population, or business within commuting or delivery radius. Minimum: They should at least be large enough to capture the full extent of accessibility effects. Criterion #4 Political Constituencies: Boundaries that align with political districts, stakeholder groups, or other entities which may have a particular interest in the corridor management process. Subject to other Criteria: Boundary areas should not be artificially constructed in ways that contradict criteria 1, 2, and 3 above solely to address political constituencies. However, areas should be inclusive of interested political districts or entities when the other criteria are met.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 14 Defining a Time Horizon: In addition to selecting an appropriate physical market influence area for a corridor, managers should select an appropriate time horizon in which to consider a corridor's assets and liabilities. Because highway and bridge infrastructure can have a life of 25- 50 or more years, it is advisable to choose a planning horizon long enough to account for a stream of benefits that may result from corridor management actions. For example, if a corridor strategy may involve a $50 million bridge replacement for a bridge with a 50-year life, then it is prudent to select a planning horizon that will capture not only the $50 million outlay during the construction period but also the long-term life which the bridge is intended to serve.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 15 Construct a Corridor Balance Sheet A corridor’s “Balance Sheet” can be understood as a summary of its assets and liabilities as an economic resource within the corridor market area over the selected time horizon. In business terms, corridor management is a way to increase a corridor’s overall value by investing to reduce its liabilities while enhancing its assets. Unlike corporate balance sheets, a corridor balance sheet may include both tangible (quantifiable) assets and liabilities as well as intangible (soft) considerations. The objective of inventorying a corridor in balance sheet terms is not to engage in an accounting exercise so much as to recognize (1) which aspects of a corridor can be understood as assets, and which aspects are liabilities, (2) consider ways that a corridor’s economic value or equity can be enhanced through management strategies, and (3) revisit the balance sheet over time to assess if there is a “Bottom Line” improvement in corridor value through the management effort. This inventory can be enhanced through the lens of the 7-D’s developed in this project that combines both quantitative and qualitative data into a more comprehensive evaluation of the corridor than is historically typical (APP 1, Table 3). Table 2: Account for Sources of Value below is an example of how a corridor balance sheet can be developed and revisited/updated over time to support both the establishment of objectives as well as the evaluation of management strategies.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 16 Table 2: Account for Sources of Value Types of Indicators Assets Sources of Benefit in a Corridor System (Reported as Annual or Current Year Value) Liabilities Sources of Avoidable Cost (Reported as Discounted Value over the Time Horizon of the Corridor) Corridor Value Overall Assessment of Corridor Value [Reported as net value (Assets-Liabilities) or as ratio (Assets/Liabilities)] Quantifiable Economic Indicators • Residual Asset Value of Highway & Bridge Infrastructure (based on lane- miles, # bridges, and remaining service life) • Value of Transit and Inter-Modal Freight Infrastructure • Assessed Value of Real Property within Market Area • Assessed Value of Technology Assets • Earning Power of Workforce Accessible in 30- minute commute • Business Output of Establishments within 3-hour same-day delivery radius • Personal Travel Time spent by cars and trucks ($ per person-hour) • Freight Travel Time consumed by goods in transit on the corridor • Reliability Time/Buffer Time spent by establishments due to congestion/bottlenecks. • Vehicle Operating Costs incurred for cars and trucks • Crash costs incurred due to safety incidents • Emissions costs incurred due to utilization • Annual cost to preserve highway and bridge assets • Annual cost to preserve, operate and maintain transit • Annual costs to preserve, operate, and maintain freight multimodal infrastructure • Assessment of overall value offered by corridor. May be expressed in terms of a ratio demonstrating overall economic activity supported per dollar of transportation user or agency costs. Some examples of corridor balance sheet ratios include: • Public Agency Cost/$ of business output supported • Private User Cost/$ of business output supported • Total Cost (Agency + User)/$ of business output supported. Intangible Indicators • Aesthetic Amenities (expressed on scale of 1-5) • Endangered Habitats Sustained in Corridor (expressed on scale 1-5) • Aesthetic liabilities of Corridor (expressed on scale of 1-5) • Equity Gap on the Corridor (expressed on a scale of 1-5) • Enumerate specific features or qualities of the corridor which account for its intangible value, describing each and how it is sensitive to corridor strategies.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 17 Accounting for Assets: Sources of value include publicly and privately held land, public infrastructure, and private equity investments as well as intangible factors such as aesthetic amenities or endangered habitats. Tangible asset values for transportation infrastructure can be quantified in terms of replacement value and remaining service life using accepted transportation asset management techniques as summarized in both the USDOT/FHWA Life Cycle Costs Primer as well as NCHRP 23-06.6 Land values can be provided by local municipal tax assessor parcel databases. Household earning power (in terms of wage income) and business output can be ascertained from US Census data, data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, or privately syndicated services such as Moody’s Analytics, IMPLAN, or Regional Economic Impact Models, Inc. Assets are reported as a snapshot of everything the corridor economy and infrastructure does (or is worth) projected at the end of the planning time horizon. Accounting for Liabilities: Corridor liabilities include the societal costs of maintaining and using the transportation on the corridor over the entire planning time horizon. Liabilities can be understood in three categories: (1) societal costs to households and businesses of using the corridor or affected third parties (such as those affected by safety or environmental effects) (2) agency costs of maintaining the corridors’ infrastructure – including hard infrastructure preservation as well as operating things like transit lines, ports, or freight terminals and (3) intangible costs such as equity gaps, aesthetic impositions, or other qualitative measures. User costs can generally be quantified using the values such as those provided in the AASHTO Red Book User Benefit Analysis for Highways TCRP 78: Estimating the Benefits and Costs of Public Transit Projects – A Guidebook for Practitioners, and the USDOT/FHWA Economic Analysis Primer. 7 Accounting for Corridor Value: The inventory of assets and liabilities equips corridor managers with multiple ways to represent balanced corridor value. Because a corridor’s value is a function of factors that may be beyond the control of corridor managers it can be helpful to use ratios. For example, considering the wage income/dollars spent on transit, or business output in key manufacturing sectors/dollars spent on freight infrastructure may be relevant metrics. Corridor managers and supporting coalitions can choose from several different balance-sheet values depending on how the corridor has been defined (as in Play 1: Define the Corridor and Its Impact) and the coalition partners (as in Play 3: Build Durable Coalitions and Processes). If corridor managers wish to fully integrate the tangible and intangible assets and liabilities into a singular index of corridor value, multi-criteria methods can be applied to assets and liabilities in the balance sheet with the methodology.8 6 US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration Office of Asset Management, Life-Cycle Cost Analysis Primer, (August, 2002), http://site.iugaza.edu.ps/nour/wp-content/uploads/7-DOT-LCCA-Primer.pdf; Transportation Research Board, “NCHRP 23-06: A Guide to Computation and Use of System Level Valuation of Transportation Assets,” (2021), http://apps.trb.org/cmsfeed/TRBNetProjectDisplay.asp?ProjectID=4787. 7 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, User and Non-User Benefit Analysis for Highways (Washington, DC: AASHTO, 2010); Transportation Research Board, TCRP Report 78: Estimating the Benefits and Costs of Public Transit Projects - A Guidebook for Practioners (Washington, DC: 2002), https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp78/guidebook/tcrp78.pdf; US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration Office of Asset Management, “Asset Management (Economic Analysis Primer),” (March 2021), https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/asset/. 8 Tsamboulas, Dimitrios A., George Yiotis, and George Mikroudis, “A Method for Multi-criteria Analysis in Transporation Infrastructure Investments,” International Journal of Transport Economics / Rivista Internazionale Di Economia Dei Trasporti 34, no. 1 (2007): 113–31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42747790.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 18 Use the Corridor Balance Sheet to Evaluate Choices The corridor balance sheet itself provides a mechanism for managers and coalition partners to holistically (1) hold a common understanding of drivers of corridor value and (2) pinpoint the features which may enhance or dilute the value over time. Once the corridor balance sheet is in place, managers can consider implications of ex-ante, ex-post, and benchmarking evaluations to identify issues, evaluate scenarios and make decisions over time (as described in Play 1: Define the Corridor and Its Impact). For example, using a balance sheet of the type shown in Table 1, managers may focus on strategies to reduce specific avoidable costs, add economic or infrastructure assets, or some combination of the two. Managers may then use predictive models to 1) assess pathways to enhance corridor value, 2) benchmark incremental changes in value, and 3) reflect on changes in corridor value over the life of the management effort. It may be advisable for corridor management charters or strategy documents to include a recurring balance-sheet-evaluation process at annual or bi-annual intervals to keep the management perspective current. Stratified Return on Investment: Organizing a corridor balance sheet reveals that the sources of value on a corridor may accrue to different parties. For example, all of the costs of performance liabilities do not fall equally across stakeholders, nor does the value of all assets equally benefit all stakeholders. The balance sheet allows managers and coalition partners to transparently identify the expected payoffs of corridor management for each participating entity. In this way, corridor managers can approach corridor management as a balancing task of (1) enhancing the overall societal value of the corridor while (2) addressing trade-offs among stakeholders regarding beneficiaries and sponsors of a corridor strategy. NCHRP-917: Right-Sizing Transportation Investments - A Guidebook for Planning and Programming offers interactive calculators and a detailed method for evaluating strategies using stratified return on investment to determine the “right-size” of an infrastructure system or program.9 A stratified return on investment approach accounts for both public and private revenues. The stratified approach considers public and private debts, identifying payoffs to all stakeholders for the corridor in terms of benficial asset conditions (APP 2.8.6). Alternative solutions are compared so that stakeholders can make a fully informed set of choices regarding future investments in the corridor. Corridor Value within Larger Decision Processes: The corridor balance sheet provides a mechanism for making the business case to include corridor improvements within larger processes. Because metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and other entities do not typically program improvements for “corridors” per se, but rather within the context of a larger State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) or Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), the balance sheet can present the case for corridor solutions within a larger investment management strategy. Furthermore, use of the balance sheet greatly simplifies the ability to articulate purpose and need for individual projects and NEPA and other processes. The decision-support flowchart developed for this project provides guidance for acting on strategies developed to enhance corridor value as part of a larger system (APP 2, Figure 27). 9 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NCHRP-917: Right-Sizing Transportation Investments - A Guidebook for Planning and Programming (Washington, DC: 2019), https://doi.org/10.17226/25680.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 19 Account for Technology A Technology Readiness & Utilization Report Card has been developed to help corridor managers identify how ready a corridor is to add specific technologies to its balance sheet of assets. This tool is web-based and available through a desktop mobile application which includes a series of questions about the corridor that help determine what elements and potential applications a corridor contains and then calculates a score for the corridor to determine its CAV readiness.10 The self-assessment is 23 multiple choice questions in which the responses correlate with a score of zero (0), one (1), or two (2) (APP 5.11). The cumulative score indicates the corridor’s readiness with a score of less than five (5) being “Low Tech” and at the beginning of a CAV readiness journey, between five (5) and 17 being “Moderate Tech” with opportunities for additional technologies, and above 17 being “High Tech” and having several of the applications already deployed. Following the self-assessment, corridor managers can follow a “recipe” for CAV readiness with a step-by-step guide on how to prepare a corridor. Steps include 1) inventorying existing traffic signals for signal technology components, 2) establishing a communication protocol with appropriate agencies and departments, 3) installing advanced traffic management system (ATMS) software, 4) hardware/software installation to broadcast CAV information between the signal and CAVs, and 5) installation of CAV applications. For corridors that are in the “High Tech” range, recommendations are given as to additional CAV applications that can be integrated into the corridor such as safety, weather, emergency response, pedestrian, and bicycle detection to name a few. 10 Modern Mobility, “Technology Readiness and Utilization Report Card,” (2021), https://modmob.shinyapps.io/Technology_Readiness//.

Playbook | Quantifying the Impacts of Corridor Management 20 Case Example: US-54/400 Andover, KS Since 1997 a portion of US-54/400 in south-central Kansas has been the subject of a corridor management agreement between state, MPO, and local regulatory partners. One study identified existing and desired land-use patterns, existing and desired highway and street infrastructure, developed an access plan, and promoted a partnership approach with developers and other private stakeholders. The inventory of the land-use characteristics included both the existing condition and market pressures and future desired land-uses and development opportunities.11 “The City of Andover, Kansas in collaboration with the Kansas Department of Transportation and the Wichita Area MPO initiated a two-and-a-half-mile corridor study along US 54/400 from159th Street (Sedgwick/Butler County line) to a half-mile east of Prairie Creek Road. Increased traffic from the growth occurring in adjacent Sedgwick County and the City of Wichita as well as western Butler County and the City of Andover is straining existing transportation infrastructure. This US 54/400 Corridor Study is the next step to identify and preserve a corridor footprint for future construction. The study also includes an urban design analysis to provide direction for the integration of land-use and transportation, and corridor character principles to provide direction of the overall character of development for the City of Andover. US 54/400 bisects the City of Andover, and the City is concerned about the impact an expanded freeway footprint will have on its ability to maintain and promote the small-town quality of life it is known for. Drawing dense new development to the US 54/400 corridor will capture a high volume of new vehicle trips within the east-west corridor, minimizing increased congestion on the north-south roads. This would preserve the character of the City of Andover while providing an economic development catalyst to increase municipal revenues. To accommodate the increased density envisioned for the corridor a robust transportation network is needed. Representatives from the City of Andover, Kansas Department of Transportation, Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, Federal Highway Administration, Butler County, Sedgwick County, and the City of Wichita with input from public officials and other stakeholders developed and evaluated four horizontal roadway alternates and two vertical alternatives. Traffic analysis, corridor uniformity, driver expectancy, and safety determined that the preferred alternative was providing three full interchanges at the mile line roads (159th Street, Andover Road, and Prairie Creek Road) with frontage roads. Public officials and the community recommended depressing the freeway section under Onewood Drive, Andover Road, and Yorktown Road despite the additional construction, operational, and maintenance costs associated with this option.” 11 Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc, “City of Andover US 54/400 Corridor Study” (December 2011), https://www.andoverks.com/DocumentCenter/View/1294/Andover-US-54-Corridor-Plan-Report.