Organizational sustainability in transportation planning: Evaluation of multi-jurisdictional agency collaboration

Although significant effort is being made in addressing infrastructure design, construction, operations, and maintenance, there is the need for assessing organizational sustainability within transportation planning. Transportation planners have identified coordination and collaboration as fundamental steps in addressing issues related to transportation network planning and sustainability initiatives. This research explores multi-jurisdictional collaboration between agencies using a case study on Pennsylvania Metropolitan/Rural Planning Organizations (MPOs/RPOs) and non-designated areas. The agencies are surveyed and the results are analyzed using a network analysis software, Gephi. In order to compare the collaboration network analysis (survey results) to influential factors, such as geographic adjacency and geographic proximity (reflective of transportation networks), GIS is used in combination with Gephi to complete geographical network analyses. The three analyses are compared using average degree, density, and average path length. The results indicate that the MPOs, RPOs, and non-designated areas within the state of Pennsylvania are collaborating, on average, beyond the geographical adjacency but below the level of geographical proximity network. In addition, email and phone communication forms are the most widely used for high frequency connection while face-to-face meetings are more likely for biannual and annual collaboration. The results of this study serve as a foundation for measuring and monitoring multi-jurisdictional collaboration to promote sustainable organizational planning in transportation.