Preparing for System Performance Measures and Target-Setting Requirements of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act

Abstract

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) established performance-based planning and programming requirements to improve transportation decision making and increase the accountability and transparency of federal highway programs. At the time of the writing of this paper, the MAP-21 performance requirements for system performance, congestion mitigation and air quality, and freight had not yet been released, but many transportation agencies had begun efforts to understand and implement performance management activities in anticipation of the MAP-21 system performance requirements. The Virginia Department of Transportation (DOT) has long been a leader in transportation performance activities. Continuing this trend, the Virginia DOT had great interest in evaluating system performance (beginning with the Interstate system) to demonstrate how system-wide measures could be computed and how targets could be set. The Virginia DOT contracted with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute to develop these measures for the Virginia Interstate system as a pilot test. This paper describes the successfully developed and demonstrated methodology for computing a number of mobility, reliability, and congestion magnitude performance measures along with targets for selected measures. Researchers divided the Virginia Interstate roadways into 199 reporting segments. Performance statistics were computed for each segment and aggregated up to the urban area, Virginia DOT district, and statewide level. Major lessons learned from this effort are documented in this paper and should serve to provide additional guidance to other agencies beginning this type of performance measurement effort.