May 20 2024
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In many cases, states and other local government agencies have performance measures developed through the extensive public outreach in the various federally and internally required strategic planning efforts. Not surprisingly, these “local” performance measures are often related to but different from the federally mandated performance measures.
For example, freight mobility in an urban area often means travel time (i.e., traditional congestion), similar to the federal system performance measures (PM3); however, in a rural area, it means the system’s ability to carry the desired loads (i.e., height, width, and load restrictions not meeting expectations causing loads to be rerouted over longer distances). In either case, the results are wasted time, money, and fuel, and more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Reducing this waste is really the goal of the federal measures above. Therefore, the same goal is being monitored, whether using the federal measures or the state and local (hereinafter, local) performance measures. This is just one example of many similarly developed local performance measures related to a national goal area but with different metrics and definitions than the national measures.
By definition, the local measures are important to the end users of the transportation system by virtue of being developed through public input. Therefore, local policymakers often want or require these measures to be used in the decision processes and to tell the local story of transportation performance, safety, condition, etc. (hereinafter, performance). It would reduce waste and improve public transparency if these local measures could also be used to tell the national system performance story. This would avoid potentially conflicting messages from local and national sources and avoid the duplicate work of collecting, monitoring, and analyzing similar measures related to the same basic goal. Additionally, the collective of local measures could be used to tell a more comprehensive and complete story of the nation’s overall movement toward its shared transportation goals through a “drill down” approach of providing greater and greater detail from the national level through the regional, state, and local community levels.
Keyword searches in the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB’s) TRID and Research in Progress (RIP) systems were performed for research related to:
• Performance Measures, Communicating
• Communicating Performance
• “National Performance”
Several projects were found related to but not overlapping this proposed topic, with the newest one being a 2015 document specific to State Department of Transportation (DOT) performance story telling. The most relevant document was a 2011 periodical article titled “Measuring Infrastructure Performance: Development of a National Infrastructure Index.” However, not only is that article dated, but it does not address the underlying research question of if and how local measures, important to the public, can be used to tell a national story about national goals.
Develop a means of consolidating the many related local measures into a set of national measures that describes and monitors how well the national transportation system is meeting (or not meeting) the traveling public’s needs as related to Congress’ strategic goals for the nation’s transportation system.
The current system of detailed nationally-defined measures monitored and reported by States and MPOs, along with locally-mandated and -defined measures, yields state, local, and national messages to the public that are often conflicting or at least are not readily understandable to the public. Additionally, collecting data on related but different measures is a duplicative burden to States DOTs and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) that is wasteful of scarce resources. Therefore, if measures that are developed with close input from the transportation system end users could be collectively used to monitor the national system’s ability to meet strategic goals, the messages to the public would be more understandable and would come at a lower cost. On a national scale, that lower cost is likely to be a very substantial savings over the current framework, given the sheer number of reporting entities (i.e., State DOTs, MPOs, transit agencies, highway safety offices, etc.).
Complete implementation would likely require Congressional action through the transportation bill reauthorization because some federal measures are dictated in the current Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law). However, in most cases, implementation could be accomplished through the federal administrative rulemaking processes.