Using New Data Sources to Meet MAP-21 Requirements for Performance-Based Planning: National Capital Region’s Experience in Monitoring Congestion and Reliability

The newly enacted transportation law, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) of the United States, has set up new requirements for performance-based transportation decision making, including establishing performance measures and targets in seven national goal areas such as congestion reduction and system reliability. To meet the new requirements, transportation agencies may face a “data gap” (e.g. insufficient data or lack of standardization of data) and a “performance measures gap” (e.g., to identify appropriate performance measures that can be shared regionally or nationally) in monitoring highway congestion and reliability. As an early adopter of emerging proprietary probe-based traffic data archive analysis, the National Capital Region’s metropolitan planning organization (MPO) has applied the data in a number of planning activities and developed hierarchical congestion and reliability performance measures that could not be produced in the past due to lack of data. This hierarchical performance measures framework features traveler delay as the overarching congestion measure and standard deviation of travel time as the overarching reliability measure. The probe-based speed data and detector-based volume data were integrated to provide personal and vehicular measures, including delay and vehicle miles traveled. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of private sector probe-based data in supporting the MAP-21 requirements, including both technical details and application experience with the hierarchical highway performance measures, feedback from the general public, and lessons learned.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABC30 Performance Measurement.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Pu, Wenjing
  • Meese, Andrew J
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
• Date: 2013

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 22p
• Monograph Title: TRB 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Metropolitan planning organizations; Monitoring; Performance measurement; Planning methods; Traffic congestion
• Identifier Terms: Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act; National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board
• Geographic Terms: Washington Metropolitan Area
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01473324
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 13-0183
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 20 2013 9:40AM