In 2013 East-West Gateway Council of Governments (EWG) issued the Congestion Management Process (CMP) Final Report, which details the CMP for the St. Louis region. As the metropolitan planning organization (MPO) for the St. Louis region, EWG is required to develop and implement the CMP as an integral part of the metropolitan planning process.
About the CMP
The CMP is a systematic and regionally accepted approach for managing congestion. It provides accurate, up-to-date information on transportation system performance and assesses alternative operational and demand management strategies for congestion mitigation. A CMP is required in metropolitan areas with population exceeding 200,000, such as the St. Louis region.
Federal legislation passed in 2012 introduced a new requirement to incorporate a performance-based approach into the transportation planning process. The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, known as MAP-21, required state departments of transportation (DOTs), metropolitan planning organizations (MPO), and transit authorities to set coordinated targets, report on a required set of performance measures and prioritize projects using a coordinated performance-based planning process. These performance requirements were continued and bolstered by the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act in 2015 and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in 2021.
The federally mandated CMP framework enables MPOs to bring a data driven, objective basis to the process of identifying and implementing congestion management strategies. The CMP is intended to be an on-going process, fully integrated into the metropolitan transportation planning process. It is a “living” document, continually evolving to address the results of performance measures, concerns of the community, new objectives and goals of the MPO, and provide up-to-date information on congestion issues.
Congestion Management and Operations Committee (CMOC)
The CMOC provides an opportunity for sharing information about the operation of the regional transportation system between stakeholders, and is a forum for supporting and promoting coordination and integration of the multi-modal regional transportation system.
The CMOC was initially established with the development and implementation of the CMP and acted in an advisory role in providing vital input and direction to the CMP planning process, outcomes, and implementation. The CMOC is comprised of vested stakeholders from federal, state, transit, and the St. Louis region’s counties and principal municipalities.
The CMOC meets on a quarterly basis addressing issues of regional congestion and operations management and assigns an ad hoc Technical Committee for addressing detailed mobility and operations issues as needed. In practice, the CMOC represents a collective framework for ongoing cross-jurisdictional coordination of traffic performance reporting, while advancing data collection activities in the process of establishing performance measures for the St. Louis region’s transportation network.
The CMOC also serves as the St. Louis Regional Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Architecture Maintenance Team. The team’s role is to identify changes in the St. Louis region related to the ITS Architecture and make decisions by consensus on how the changes should be reflected in the Architecture.
Annual Regional Congestion Report
The CMP requires monitoring of the transportation system and evaluation of congestion. EWG produces an Annual Regional Congestion Report that identifies congested locations on the region’s transportation system. The report evaluates congestion levels and provides an area wide picture of how travel on various roadways is affected by congestion.
2023 Annual Regional Congestion Report
— 2022 congested locations included
2021 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2020 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2019 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2018 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2017 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2016 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2015 Annual Regional Congestion Report
2013 Congestion Management Process Report
Congestion Dashboard
The congestion dashboard is a visualization tool that provides a spatial representation of the congested segments of the transportation network within the St. Louis region. The tool contains information on the length of congested roads, the severity of congestion, and the planning and travel time indices. The congestion dashboard complements the Congestion Report and is accessible via the following links.