CommuteCon 2018

Dan Sheehan and Tim Kovach joined us to discuss technology-driven TDM collaboration. Sheehan is the Gohio Commute coordinator for the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, and Kovach is the air quality planner for the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency. The organizations recently came together as part of a major collaborative effort designed to address the future of mobility in the state.

In 2015, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission’s primary TDM goal was to provide ridematching information and services to commuters. It was a siloed, linear operation with limited scope, and management tasks were fragmented into two different groups, divided among the seven participating metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).

Numerous problems arose because of the way the program was administered. Its online platforms were incompatible, and largely ineffective. As a result, Sheehan began to wonder if the seven partner MPOs could collaborate to create a unified mission across the entire state.

This gave birth to a new initiative: a unified, multimodal, mobile-friendly model. The two-year process of upgrading the program took a broadened focus on a complete range of mobility and transportation options, with an emphasis on incentive-based behavior change. In addition to a new platform, the resultant program was given a new logo and a new name: Gohio Commute.

Gohio Commute is now coordinated across the entire state, and uses a consensus model with aligned, shared goals that acknowledge the regional differences and varied priorities of the participating MPOs. The new platform is available in 54 counties across four states, and is available to about nine million people.

The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency is a Gohio Commute partner for the Cleveland area. Kovach’s work with the agency includes performance tracking and metric analysis, and he has seen major improvements since the relaunch of the newly branded Gohio Commute program. In his domain, Kovach has seen single-occupancy vehicle mileage savings of about 480,000 miles, as well as 135 tons of carbon dioxide mitigation, more than 3.5 million calories burned, and about $155,000 in cost savings since Gohio Commute’s 2017 launch.

In this case, collaboration breathed new life into an underperforming commuter program. To learn more about Gohio Commute’s dramatic success story, watch Sheehan and Kovach’s full presentation.