Efficiency Benchmarking Framework for Highway Patrol Agencies and Implementation for the Wyoming Highway Patrol

Maral Jalili,Mehmet E Ozbek

doi:10.3390/infrastructures4030040

Abstract

With many lives lost every year in crashes, highway traffic safety is a major concern. With 93% of crashes being contributed to by roadway users’ poor behaviors, one of the most effective ways to improve highway traffic safety is to improve the performance of organizations enforcing traffic laws to change those poor behaviors. This research introduces a framework that makes it possible to benchmark the efficiency performance within the highway patrol. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), a mathematical methodology based on the concepts of optimization and linear programming, was used to develop that framework to measure the efficiency performance of a highway patrol’s divisions. Such framework is used to measure and compare the efficiency performance of 17 divisions of the Wyoming Highway Patrol to allow internal benchmarking and thus to improve the overall organizational performance. The concepts discussed in this paper can be implemented by highway patrol agencies for internal and external efficiency benchmarking. Although DEA has been utilized for organizational performance evaluation in multiple sectors, literature review to date has not identified any study that has specifically utilized DEA in the context of highway traffic safety from the highway patrol’s perspective. As such, this study is original and timely.

Highlights

In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are considered to be the leading cause of death for children, teens and young adults up to age 34 [1]
This paper presents all of the implementation stages of the framework in which real data from Wyoming Highway Patrol (WHP)’s database is utilized
This paper discusses performance measurement and benchmarking concepts for highway patrol agencies and introduces a framework that can be used by highway patrol agencies for performance measurement and benchmarking

Summary

Introduction

In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are considered to be the leading cause of death for children, teens and young adults up to age 34 [1]. In addition to causing loss of lives, motor vehicle crashes result in hundreds of thousands of injured victims and billions of dollars in property damages every year [3]. Statistics show that 32,367 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2011 [4]. This number represents the fewest number of people killed in traffic crashes in a single year since 1949, it indicates that an average of 89 lives per day were lost in traffic crashes [5]. The most recent available statistics show a significant increase from that lowest number of fatalities that was observed in 2011, with 37,133 deaths in 2017 [6]

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Conclusion