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MPO opens 20-day public review for congestion management process update
Summary
The MPO Policy Committee approved initiating a 20-day public comment period for the draft 2025 Congestion Management Process update. Staff described an eight-step federal framework, performance measures and plans for ongoing evaluation and annual reporting.
The MPO Policy Committee moved to open a 20-day public review and comment period for the draft 2025 Congestion Management Process (CMP) update after staff gave a multi-part presentation on the document and its performance measures.
The CMP update follows an eight-step framework taken from federal guidance and identifies a two-tier congestion network, federally mandated performance measures (including travel time and reliability indices), data-collection methods and candidate strategies to reduce recurring and nonrecurring congestion. Eduardo Barranas, a member of the presentation team, said, “The congestion management process that we're gonna be reviewing today is an update from the previous CMP, which was done several years ago.”
MPO staff described tier 1 as derived from national performance-management research data and tier 2 from local stakeholder data. System-level measures include speed, travel-time index and buffer-time index; corridor measures include travel-time index, level of travel-time reliability, short-trip travel-time reliability and peak-hour excess delay. Staff said the CMP will be used to evaluate strategy effectiveness at project and program levels and to produce annual reports that inform the Metropolitan Transportation Plan and project prioritization.
Committee members asked how unfunded projects and planned corridors — including River Road and the Laredo Outer Loop Segment 5 — will be handled. Staff said corridor projects not yet built remain in the CMP network for before-and-after evaluation when constructed. Members also asked whether freight trains and the international-rail crossings would be included; presenters confirmed rail crossings and their impacts are considered and noted past studies reporting an average of about 26 trains across the border per 24-hour period.
Questions also covered whether CMP data supports requests to funding agencies. Staff said the CMP’s ongoing data collection and annual reporting will inform MTP updates and project prioritization used in local and state funding discussions. The committee voted to initiate the 20-day public-comment period; staff said the draft may be adopted after the comment period and a subsequent review.
