A Project Evaluation Toolkit (PET) for Abstracted Networks

This report summarizes research for Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Project No. 0-6487, which enhanced and expanded the open-source Project Evaluation Toolkit (PET) to evaluate operational strategies for transport project (and policy) impact evaluation. Such strategies include advanced traveler information systems, speed harmonization, shoulder use, incident management, and ramp metering. PET is a user-friendly, comprehensive sketch-level project evaluation planning tool, anticipating changes in travel demand, traffic patterns, crashes, emissions, traveler welfare, reliability, project net present values, benefit-cost ratios, and other performance metrics. PET also tracks project financing measures for a number of project types, including capacity expansion projects, tolling, and managed lane facilities. Beyond operational strategies, this project increased PET’s scope, usability, and accuracy in other ways. For example, new transit and fixed-cost features allow for deeper and more meaningful mode choice and network modeling, while a network visualization module dramatically facilitates user generation and editing of modeled networks. New features also allow users to bypass PET’s built-in travel demand model (TDM) to evaluate external TDM outputs directly. Such features allow more sophisticated modelers the chance to apply PET to their own TDM outputs, for a much wider variety of outputs than traditionally available to transportation planners and engineers. As noted, outputs include emissions, crash counts, reliability, toll revenues, and benefit-cost ratios, among others. PET capabilities include budget allocation tolls, multi-criteria assessment (of multi-faceted projects, using decision envelopment analysis), and sensitivity analysis (to produce distributions of project performance metrics, recognizing that many/most inputs have some uncertainty associated with them). Alongside these scope-enhancing changes are updates to crash and emissions estimation procedures, reflecting the latest Highway Safety Manual and Environmental Protection Agency emissions (MOVES) estimation routines. This project also developed a variety of professional supporting materials for PET users, including an extensive User’s Guide, presentation materials (for rapid training of new users), and four urban roadway networks (for Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio). All these, along with several relevant papers and reports, are available at http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/PET_Website/homepage.htm

• Record URL:
  http://www.utexas.edu/research/ctr/pdf_reports/0_6487_1.pdf
• 
• Summary URL:
  https://library.ctr.utexas.edu/dbtw-wpd/exec/dbtwpub.dll?AC=QUERY&TN=catalog&RL=1&RF=.Detail&BU=http%3A%2F%2Flibrary.ctr.utexas.edu%2Fdbtw-wpd%2Ftextbase%2Fbrowsenew.htm&QY=find+ID+%3D+30888&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewestTxdotResearch+%28New+TxDOT+Research+Publications+%28Feed%29%29
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Project title: Development of a Performance Measurement Based Methodology to Objectively Compare Operational Improvements with Capacity Additions.
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Texas, Austin

  Center for Transportation Research, 1616 Guadalupe Street
  Austin, TX  United States  78701-1255

  Texas Department of Transportation

  Research and Technology Implementation Office, P.O. Box 5080
  Austin, TX  United States  78763-5080

  Federal Highway Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Kockelman, Kara M
  • Fagnant, Dan
  • Nichols, Brice
  • Boyles, Steve
• Publication Date: 2012-10

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 88p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Economic impacts; Evaluation and assessment; Network analysis (Planning); Performance measurement; Programming (Planning); Project management; Software
• Geographic Terms: Texas
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01472540
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: FHWA/TX-2013/0-6487-1, 0-6487-1
• Contract Numbers: 0-6487
• Files: TRIS, ATRI, USDOT, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Feb 19 2013 8:47AM