With transportation performance management (TPM), transportation agencies use roadway performance information such as reliability and delay to help make investment and policy decisions to achieve transportation system performance goals. The purpose of this project was to provide examples of different options available to state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations for setting the roadway performance targets required for performance management.
The federal Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) and the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act require states to transition to the performance management approach. As part of that transition, states must set performance standards—or targets, commonly referred to as “PM3 measures”—for travel time reliability and freight movement.
Target setting is both important and challenging, as targets are key components of roadway performance management and are also critical for communicating information about the transportation system to decision-makers, stakeholders, and the traveling public.
To provide examples of different options for developing and using targets and measures, the researchers reviewed federal regulations pertaining to target setting, past FHWA technical reports and presentations on performance management and national performance measures, and case studies from Washington state and North Carolina, which have been engaged in performance management and target setting.
Based on that review, the resulting report provides approaches available to state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations for setting roadway performance targets, specifically for travel time-based performance measures. It reviews the concept of TPM—the impetus for target setting—and Performance-Based Planning and Programming, which is a key part of implementing TPM. It also provides an overview of federal target-setting requirements and identifies challenges and noteworthy practices from around the country.
Key findings of the project include the following:
- Targets create an observable and quantifiable link between investment decisions and performance expectations.
- Most travel demand models have been developed to forecast older performance measures, such as volume-to-capacity and vehicle-hours traveled, but no state DOT or local agency appears to have developed a model to forecast any of the PM3 reliability or delay measures.
- Resources available to agencies to aid in target setting include data sources that supplement publicly available travel time data; models and analytical tools that aid in forecasting demand and performance; and the experience of peer agencies. Effectively leveraging these resources helps agencies set realistic targets and avoid pitfalls that may result from external factors beyond their control.
Authors:
Christopher Lindsey
Moggan Motamed
Richard Margiotta
Cambridge Systematics, Inc.
Mark Hallenbeck
Washington State Transportation Center-UW
Sponsor: FHWA