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FHWA Home / Policy & Governmental Affairs / 2013 Conditions and Performance

Conditions and Performance

FHWA - 2013 Conditions and Performance: Introduction (Little Book)
2013 Status of the Nation's Highways, Bridges, and Transit:
Conditions & Performance

Introduction

This document is a summary of the 2013 Status of the Nation's Highways, Bridges, and Transit: Conditions and Performance report to Congress (C&P report). The C&P report is intended to provide decision makers with an objective appraisal of the physical conditions, operational performances, and financing mechanisms of highways, bridges, and transit systems based both on the current state of these systems and on their projected future state under a set of alternative future investment scenarios. This report offers a comprehensive, data-driven background context to support the development and evaluation of legislative, program, and budget options at all levels of government. It also serves as a primary source of information for national and international news media, transportation associations, and industry.

The 2013 C&P report draws primarily on 2010 data, which reflect funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) (Pub.L. 111–5). The 2010 C&P Report, transmitted on March 15, 2012, was based primarily on 2008 data.

The main body of the report is organized into four major sections. Part I, "Description of Current System," contains the core retrospective analyses of the report, including chapters on household travel and highway freight movement, system characteristics, system conditions, safety, system performance, and finance.

Part II, "Investment/Performance Analysis," contains the core prospective analyses of the report, including 20-year future capital investment scenarios. The highway investment scenarios presented in this report are developed in part from the Highway Economic Requirements System (HERS), which uses benefit-cost analysis to optimize highway investment. The HERS model quantifies user, agency, and societal costs for various types and combinations of improvements, including travel time and vehicle operating, safety, capital, maintenance, and emissions costs. Bridge investment scenario estimates are developed from the National Bridge Investment Analysis System (NBIAS) model. Unlike earlier bridge models (and similar to HERS), NBIAS incorporates benefit-cost analysis into the bridge investment/performance evaluation. The transit investment analysis is based on the Transit Economic Requirements Model (TERM). The TERM consolidates older engineering-based evaluation tools and introduces a benefit-cost analysis to ensure that investment benefits exceed investment costs. TERM identifies the investments needed to replace and rehabilitate existing assets, improve operating performance, and expand transit systems to address the growth in travel demand.

Part III, "Special Topics," explores some topics related to the primary analyses in the earlier sections of the report, including the transportation systems serving Federal and Tribal lands, the FHWA Center for Accelerating Innovation, and FTA's National Fuel Cell Bus Program. Potential future changes to the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) are discussed in Part IV, "Recommendations for the HPMS". The report also contains three technical appendices that describe the investment/performance methodologies used in the report for highways, for bridges, and for transit. A fourth appendix describes ongoing research activities and identifies potential areas for improvement in the data and analytical tools used to produce the analyses contained in this report.

Cautionary Notes on Using This Report

In order to correctly interpret the analyses presented in this report, it is important to understand the framework in which they were developed and to recognize their limitations. This document is not a statement of Administration policy, and the future investment scenarios presented are intended to be illustrative only. The report does not endorse any particular level of future highway, bridge, or transit investment. It does not address what future Federal surface transportation programs should look like, or what level of future surface transportation funding can or should be provided by the Federal government, State governments, local governments, the private sector, or system users. Making recommendations on policy issues such as these would go beyond the legislative mandate for the report and would violate its objectivity. Outside analysts can and do make use of the statistics presented in the C&P report to draw their own conclusions, but any analysis attempting to use the information presented in this report to determine a target Federal program size would require a whole series of additional policy and technical assumptions that go well beyond what is reflected in the report itself.

The investment scenario estimates presented in this report are estimates of the performance that could be achieved with a given level of funding, not necessarily what would be achieved with it. The analytical tools used in the development of these estimates combine engineering and economic procedures, determining deficiencies based on engineering standards while applying benefit-cost analysis procedures to identify potential capital improvements to address deficiencies that may have positive net benefits. Although the models generally assume that projects are prioritized based on their benefit-cost ratios, that assumption deviates somewhat from actual patterns of project selection and funding distribution that occur in the real world. Consequently, the level of investment identified as the amount required to maintain a certain performance level should be viewed as illustrative only, and should not be considered a projection or prediction of actual condition and performance outcomes likely to result from a given level of national spending.

Recovery Act

In February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act authorized $48.1 billion for programs administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). Of most relevance to the transportation modes reflected in the C&P report are the $27.5 billion appropriated for programs administered by FHWA and $8.4 billion appropriated for programs administered by FTA. In addition, highway, bridge, and transit projects were eligible to compete for Office of the Secretary of Transportation's Supplemental Discretionary Grant for a National Surface Transportation System program, later referred to as the TIGER I program.

Consistent with the operation of the regular Federal-aid program funds as a reimbursement program, the Recovery Act funds were obligated to specific projects up front, but the actual transfer of Federal dollars to the grant recipients occurs more gradually over the life of the projects. Through the end of 2010, approximately $17.3 billion of Recovery Act funding had been expended for highway projects, and approximately $3.5 billion had been expended for transit projects. Consequently the 2010 conditions and performance data presented in this report do not yet fully reflect the results of the Recovery Act investments. Recovery Act investments will continue to impact future financial data, as well as condition and performance data.

Because the financial statistics presented in the C&P report are cash-based, the Recovery Act funding is accounted for at the time that States and transit agencies are reimbursed, and appears in the revenue figures as support from Federal general funds. During 2010, $11.9 billion of funding appropriated under the Recovery Act funds were expended for highway purposes and $2.4 billion were expended for transit capital investments.


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