Growing federal program emphasis on system performance measurement and management is encouraging state departments of transportation to develop effective performance measures and performance monitoring practices. These efforts are producing a rapidly expanding body of information about agencies’ research on and evaluations of performance measurement and monitoring. However, transportation systems management and operations (TSMO) staff and their advisors in academia and private practice face significant challenges in trying to gain access to this information. These practitioners risk duplicating previous work, adopting measures and practices that others have found to be inappropriate, or both. In response, this project surveyed the current state of practice in TSMO performance measurement and monitoring and developed a user-friendly tool to assist TSMO professionals in finding and retrieving topic-specific information about current practice.
TRAC researchers assisted the Florida Atlantic University research team in surveying available literature, ongoing development efforts, and ongoing research. The team then developed a classification scheme that will help practitioners access information about specific areas of TSMO performance measurement and monitoring.
The classification scheme includes 18 categories of TSMO: access management, active parking management, active traffic management, adaptive traffic signal technology, bicycle and pedestrian management, corridor and arterial traffic management, freeway management, freight, geometric design, high occupancy vehicle lanes, pricing/toll roads, ramp metering, road weather management, signal timing, traffic signal program management, transit operations, transit signal priority, and travel demand management.
For each of the TSMO categories, performance measures are grouped into four objectives: operations, safety, economics, and environment. Each individual performance measure is included in one or more of these four categories. The final report also presents tables that relate specific performance measures to each TSMO strategy objective, to enable practitioners to quickly retrieve proper performance measures to evaluate TSMO strategies.
NCHRP anticipates that AASHTO and the National Operations Center of Excellence will use the classification scheme to provide user-friendly access to information about TSMO performance measurement and monitoring practices and research.
Authors:
Aleksandar Stevanovic, Florida Atlantic University
Ali Soltani Sobh, Florida Atlantic University
Michael Pack, University of Maryland CATT Lab
Mark Hallenbeck, Washington State Transportation Center-UW
Lily Elefteriadou, University of Florida Transportation Institute
Sponsors:
Florida Atlantic University
National Cooperative Highway Research Program
NCHRP Project Manager: Andrew C. Lemer