Performance Measures

What do we measure and why?

What are our goals and are we meeting them? Are we trying to provide access to jobs or encouraging healthy lifestyles or reducing congestion or reducing carbon emissions - or all or some of the above? Are we interested in transit efficiency and measuring costs compared with revenue? Are we assessing safety of workers and riders?

Measuring Transportation Investments: The Road to Results examines whether states are measuring performance and what they are measuring. The report from the Pew Center on the States and the Rockefeller Foundation does not analyze the performance metrics, but describes what metrics are being utilized across different modes, primarily looking at auto-centric travel.

An interesting section discusses the Transportation Investment Generating
Economic Recovery program, or TIGER grants.

One typical TIGER grant awarded $22 million toward a new station in downtown Normal, Illinois, a city along the Chicago-St. Louis Amtrak Line, which will serve Amtrak, city and long-distance buses and taxis. State officials say the
project shows a potent multiplier effect in terms of economic development.
“Since that project was announced, up to $200 million has been invested in the downtown area by businesses coming into town,” says Joe Shacter, director of public and intermodal transportation at the Illinois Department of Transportation. “This included new hotels constructed right next to the intermodal facility.”

Standardized Performance Measures

If success can be replicated, if success can even be determined, then we have to compare apples with apples and and better yet, one type of Macintosh with another type. TCRP Report 141, A Methodology for Performance Measurement and Peer Comparison in the Public Transportation Industry complements "TCRP Report 88: A Guidebook for Developing a Transit Performance-Measurement System, which describes how to implement and use performance measurement on an ongoing basis at a transit agency."

TCRP Report 141 talks about "selecting performance measures appropriate to a particular performance question but [the report] does not prescribe a particular set of measures. This approach requires some thoughtfulness on the part of transit agencies in selecting measures, but also provides much-needed flexibility that allows the methodology to be applied to a wide variety of transit modes, transit agency sizes, and performance questions." The report discusses benchmarking, which is a comparison of peers, in this case transit agencies that are similar. "Participants agree upon common measures and data definitions—this provides standardization, focuses data collection on areas of interest to the group, and gives participants more confidence in the quality of the data and the results."

The report supplied six case studies of peer benchmarking for different types and sizes of public transit. Two of the case studies were (1) costs and revenue comparisons performed for Pennsylvania systems; and (2) funding source ramifications for Knoxville, Tenn.

Performance Measurement in Action

CalTrans, the California Department of Transportation, posts its performance indicators and measurements. Performance Measures For The Quarter Ending March 31, 2011 shows CalTrans' goals and realities. The document reports numbers for safety, rail ridership, single occupancy vehicle commuter trips, and much more. The frank statement of goals that arrows on charts provide when compared with the direction of actual results is illuminating and valuable data for transit agencies as well as taxpayers, voters, politicians and those who report to them.

TCRP Report 88, published in 2003, is a must read. There is a veritable department store of performance categories and measures as well as case studies.

There is tons more to read about performance measures. I am left with these thoughts: Choose how you define success, examine how success was reached in similar contexts and adapt lessons learned in keeping with the local culture and resources. And, of course, measure those results - because what gets measured is what gets resources and attention.