The integration of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and management and operations (M&O) into the institutionalized planning and programming process is an essential precondition for improving service. This paper attempts to incorporate the convergence of recent relevant experience and thinking from three sources. First, it includes the experience―through formal transportation system management (TSM) and congestion management systems (CMS) planning―with incorporating supply and demand management-based improvement projects (including ITS) into the conventional statewide or metropolitan planning and programming process and participants. Second, this paper also reflects the more recent experience with ITS-deployment planning as a discrete systems engineering and integration activity that is conducted separately from the conventional planning and programming process by staff of facility-owner operations. Finally, it includes the emergence of a policy focus on systems M&O at the state and metropolitan level, with implications for not only planning and programming but also for the roles and relationships among stakeholders in the real-time service delivery that is implied. The concept of M&O provides a distinct policy orientation-one that can stand alone or be combined with other policies and programs, such as highway capacity expansion. ITS is a principal programmatic means of pursuing this policy through the regionally integrated application of computation, communication, and control technologies. The context for surface transportation has changed radically over the last 2 decades, whereas the conventions of transportation network services have hardly changed. There is an emerging confluence of 21st-century context features that reflects a new reality: a knowledge-based society places a high premium on information, efficiency, convenience, and responsive services.
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