Recommendation: Coordinate infrastructure operations and maintenance

The region’s transportation, water, and other infrastructure extends across multiple jurisdictions, requiring collaboration to ensure a well-functioning system and maximize public investments. Collaborating on infrastructure allows the region’s communities to deliver vital services, resulting in capital cost savings and lower operational costs through economies of scale. It can also benefit municipalities that lack the capacity to independently host an infrastructure project. And capital projects that combine transportation elements with water or wastewater improvements can better leverage limited capital funds. Municipalities in the region often already share infrastructure or collaborate on joint or aggregated projects. One current example is the Cal-Sag Trail, where a group of municipalities along the Cal-Sag Channel collaborated with other public and private partners to construct a 26-mile trail using more than $35 million in federal, state, municipal, and private funds. This approach can work on a smaller scale as well.^{{{Friends of the Cal-Sag Trail, https://www.calsagtrail.org.}}}

Project coordination across infrastructure types to achieve multiple goals

Improved coordination across entities that build and maintain road, pedestrian, stormwater, water, and utility infrastructure can reduce the number of times improvements must be made. Digging once can help communities achieve multiple goals and benefits in a single project.

Dig once for coordinated utility infrastructure projects

Widen sidewalks

Upgrade street lighting and integrate with technology

Install green infrastructure within the right of way

Install bicycle parking, street furniture, and public art within the right of way

Bicycle network improvements

Improve accessibility at intersections

Another challenge in delivering capital projects and improving roadway system performance is disruption resulting from construction. Coordination of projects across transportation agencies, water and wastewater infrastructure providers, and utility companies could reduce the frequency and duration of construction on rights of way and potentially decrease costs, reduce driver delays, and improve safety. In addition, schedule delays during road construction projects caused by the presence of utilities can impose significant cost increases. Often utility infrastructure — including publicly or privately owned communications, electricity, gas, water, or other lines or equipment — is located in the transportation facility right of way and must be relocated or removed during construction. Coordination with utility companies is important to avoid construction delays.^{{{Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, “Policies to improve coordination between utilities and transportation agencies,” October 14, 2016, https://cmap.illinois.gov/wp-content/uploads/Utility-coordination_v4.pdf.}}} 

For day-to-day highway operations, effective coordination can reduce the need for costly roadway expansion by making the most efficient use of the existing system. The roadway system is most effectively managed when coordination goes beyond an individual operating agency.^{{{Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, “Highway Operations,” February 2017, https://cmap.illinois.gov/wp-content/uploads/Highway-Operations-Strategy-Paper.pdf.}}}

Establishing real-time communication and operational agreements between roadway agencies, emergency management services, transit providers, and traveler information services can improve transportation system safety and reliability, and reduce congestion. 

The impact of cooperation on reliability

Automating communication between transportation agencies, sharing traffic management resources, and collaborating to build transportation technology infrastructure can improve roadway operations and reliability.

One or many traffic management centers communicate with multiple agencies and make coordinated operational decisions

Expressways and arterials are managed together to optimize system performance rather than an individual roadway

Transit vehicles share communication infrastructure with highway agencies

Infrastructure from multiple jurisdictions is modernized, interconnected, and operated from one or more central locations

Real-time information is collected from connected vehicles to monitor system operational and physical condition. Information is then shared with other agencies

Partner with other units of government to deliver infrastructure projects

Transportation agencies should partner with one another as well as with other entities that implement infrastructure projects. Improved coordination can speed up the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, reduce the number of times that roadways must be reconstructed, and improve system reliability. Project coordination could include jointly delivering single infrastructure projects or aggregating infrastructure projects across boundaries to increase cost efficiencies or financing options. This could also simply mean replicating existing efforts like the Chicago Project Coordination Office to coordinate across entities that maintain roadways, water infrastructure, and utilities to reduce the number of times underground improvements must be made.

Strategies