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Old Colony Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)

The Old Colony Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) serves the Old Colony region and is advised by the Joint Transportation Committee (JTC). The MPO is the region’s organization responsible for prioritizing transportation initiatives and producing the Transportation Improvement Plan. Voting members include the communities of Brockton, Plymouth, West Bridgewater and Whitman, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), Brockton Area Transit (BAT), and the Old Colony Planning Council.

The Old Colony Metropolitan Planning Organization operates under the following four Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs): the 3C Process MOU, the Performance-Based Planning and Programming Process MOU, the Conduct of Transportation – Air Quality MOU, (the Barnstable Urbanized Area Designation MOU), and the (Boston) Urbanized Area Designation MOU.

In accordance with the March 2018 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) relating to the comprehensive, continuing, and cooperative transportation planning process, the Old Colony Planning Council (OCPC) is authorized to elect the two representatives of Boards of Selectmen/Town Councils to serve as Local Signatories on the Old Colony MPO. The process is available here.

Meetings of the Old Colony MPO are scheduled for 10:00 AM on the third Tuesday of the month. Please refer to the OCPC Meeting Calendar located on the Old Colony Planning Council Homepage for details and confirmation.

Robert Sullivan, Mayor, City of Brockton

Richard J. Quintal, Jr., Chair, Select Board, Plymouth

Michael Perez, Vice-Chair, Board of Selectmen, West Bridgewater

Monica Tibbits- Nutt, MassDOT Secretary and Chief Executive Officer

Daniel Salvucci, Vice Chairman, Board of Selectmen, Whitman

Jonathan Gulliver, MassDOT Administrator, Highway Division

Michael Lambert, Administrator, BAT

Rebecca Coletta, President, OCPC

What is a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)?

An MPO is a regional transportation policy-making organization consisting of representatives from local government, regional transit operators, and state transportation agencies. Federal legislation passed in the early 1970s required the formation of an MPO for any urbanized area with a population greater than 50,000. MPOs were created to ensure that existing and future expenditures for transportation projects and programs were based on a “3-C planning process”:

  • Continuing: Planning must be maintained as an ongoing activity and should address both short-term needs and the long-term vision for the region;
  • Cooperative: The process must involve a wide variety of interested parties through a public participation process; and
  • Comprehensive: The process must cover all transportation modes and be consistent with regional and local land-use and economic-development plans.
What do MPOs do?

MPOs create a fair and impartial setting for effective regional decision making in the metropolitan area with inclusionary approaches to effectively engage communities and stakeholders. MPOs achieve this by producing three principal planning documents:

Transportation Planning Certification Review Report – February 2020

The activities of the Old Colony MPO are reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration. The most recent Transportation Planning Certification Review Report was issued in February 2020. The report is available here.

The Coordinated Public Transit-Human Services Transportation Plan (CHSTP) identifies the region’s unmet human-service transportation needs, describes the current transportation network and the transportation providing agencies and provides provide strategies for meeting these needs, and prioritizes transportation services for funding and implementation. The CHSTP Plan is prepared by the MPO to allow organizations in the region to be eligible to receive funding from the Federal Transit Administration’s Section 5310 transit funding program. This program provides capital and operations funding for services for the elderly and persons with disabilities and is prepared every four years. 

2023 Coordinated Human Services Transportation Plan

Transportation Performance Management (TPM) is a strategic approach which connects investment and policy decisions to help achieve safety, mobility, and system performance goals. 

Performance measures are quantitative criteria used to evaluate progress towards those goals.  Performance measure targets are the benchmarks against which collected data is gauged.  Transportation Performance Management has been integrated into the transportation planning process framework of Federal Planning Factors, National Performance Goals and Federal Planning Emphasis Areas 

The TIP and UPWP integrate MassDOT’s and the MPOs’ performance measures and link transportation-investment decisions to progress toward achieving performance targets. Implementation of the projects and services programmed in TIP help to make progress towards the achievement of the performance targets for Safety (PM1), Bridge and Pavement Condition (PM2), System Performance Measures (PM3), and Transit Asset Management (TAM) State of Good Repair (SGR). 

The MPOs, MassDOT, and providers of public transportation jointly agree and have developed specific written provisions for cooperatively developing and sharing information related to transportation performance data, the selection of performance targets, the reporting of performance targets, the reporting of performance to be used in tracking progress towards attainment of critical outcomes for the MPO regions, and the collection of data for the MassDOT Asset Management Plan.

The activities of the Old Colony MPO are reviewed by the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration.

2023 Transportation Planning Certification Review Report

The MPO is required, under the authorized transportation bill, to publish an annual listing of projects which funds have been obligated in the preceding year as a record of project delivery and progress report for public information and disclosure. This list is available here

Meeting Recordings

Meeting Materials

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