Methodologies to Measure and Quantify Transportation Management Center Benefits: Final Synthesis Report

1. Introduction

1.1 Purpose of Project

TMCs considered in this project include those that are normally responsible for the operation and management of ITS field equipment, freeway management, signal systems management, incident management, and corridor management. The purpose of this project was to identify key measures that can be used to execute operational strategies and methodologies that can be used to implement those measures, including structures for organizing the data and the algorithms and processes required.

The archived data management systems (ADMSs) that provide a key element for this project support the following TMC functions:⁽¹⁾

• Operational strategy development.
• Operations planning.
• Long-term planning.
• Policy investment decisionmaking.

When coupled with performance measures that use these data, the results from applying the methodologies addressed provide the basis for developing reports and presentations that justify project investment to decisionmakers and the public. Such results also form the basis for future resource allocations and improvements in operations. In many cases, agencies develop reports that provide results to the public on the performance of TMCs and ITSs that they manage.

This project emphasizes the computation of measures from data that are commonly available to TMCs from traffic detectors in the systems managed by those TMCs. Other data, such as crash record data, are also required for benefit-cost evaluations. This report focuses on outcome-oriented measures rather than output-oriented measures.

The content of this report is organized as follows:

• Section 1 provides an introduction to the report.
• Section 2 describes TMC functions and examples of systems for performance evaluation.
• Section 3 provides a representative set of performance measures.
• Section 4 describes the spatial and temporal data structures to be employed by the processes used for the development and computation of the measures.
• Section 5 identifies recommended measures and the algorithms and processes for their computation.
• Section 6 describes technologies for collecting data, data quality control, automation of surface street data collection, and standards.
• Section 7 provides algorithms and other methodologies for obtaining travel time and delay, throughput, safety, fuel consumption, emissions, service quality and user perceptions, characteristics of incidents, service patrol measures, responses to weather situations, and an evaluation of motorist information databases.
• Section 8 describes a methodology to develop the benefit-cost ratio and techniques for alternative presentations of benefit-cost data.
• Three appendices support these sections.