Document Library

This special report provides guidance on the effective use of stimulus funds by state and federal transportation agencies. It addresses states' use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds and describes methods for evaluating future investments.

This article discusses the Hoshin Kanri method for strategic planning in organizations. It includes a step-by-step framework that guides users to create 3-5 year goals and strategies with this method.

This presentation from the February 2014 Lean Forum includes detailed presentations from the Ohio DOT, North Carolina DOT, ASQ Government Division. It also provides an update on the Consortium for Lean in State/Provincial Governments.

This monograph is a synthesis of research carried out on traffic signal performance measures based on high-resolution controller event data, assembled into a methodology for performance evaluation of traffic signal systems. High-resolution data consist of a log of discrete events such as changes in detector and signal phase states. A discussion is provided on the collection and management of the signal event data and on the necessary infrastructure to collect these data. A portfolio of performance measures is then presented, focusing on several different topics under the umbrella of traffic signal systems operation. System maintenance and asset management is one focus. Another focus is signal operations, considered from the perspectives of vehicle capacity allocation and vehicle progression. Performance measures are also presented for non-vehicle modes, including pedestrians, and
modes that require signal preemption and priority features. Finally, the use of travel time data is demonstrated for evaluating system operations and assessing the impact of signal retiming activities.

The objective of this research is to develop a guide for selecting level-of-service targets for maintaining and operating highway assets.

Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) establishes national objectives to increase productivity and economic efficiency of the nation's freight infrastructure. The recent passage of MAP-21 has placed an emphasis on integrating asset and performance management tools to help transportation agencies better manage the critical transportation infrastructure. Infrastructure performance management expands the more traditional definition of Asset Management to include measurement and reporting of how those assets achieve their targeted operational objectives. While congestion and bottlenecks in urbanized areas readily, and deservedly, catch the attention of policy makers, many miles of multimodal transportation occur prior to freight trips arriving in (or accrue after leaving) urban areas. These miles and the ability to efficiently navigate them directly impact the productivity of the region's diverse transportation system. This project identifies and seeks to remedy performance measure gaps and freight mobility issues as they relate to identifying the appropriate infrastructure capacity to meet demand for both domestic and international economic competitiveness.

This project provides research support essential to successful implementation of State Strategic Highway Safety Plans and, ultimately, achieving national goals for reductions in fatalities and serious injuries.

This handbook offers numerous ideas on how to communicate reliability information in graphical and tabular form. The display options fall into categories of maps, tables, and figures and graphs.

"Travel time reliability can be defined as consistency of travel time over time. The primary goal of SHRP 2 Reliability research is to improve the reliability of highway travel times by mitigating the effects of events that cause travel times to fluctuate unpredictably. Through this research, seven sources of unreliable travel times have been identified: traffic incidents, work zones, demand fluctuations, special events, traffic control devices, weather, and inadequate base capacity.
This guide documents the research of the L02 Project, Establishing Monitoring Programs for Travel Time Reliability. It also provides further discussion of how to develop and use a travel time reliability monitoring system (TTRMS). The Guide will be useful for system operators in determining what actions they need to take to reduce the variability of travel time and enhance reliability."

Within the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2), Project L02 focused on creat- ing a suite of methods by which transportation agencies could monitor and evaluate travel time reliability. Creation of the methods also produced an improved understanding of why and how travel times vary and the factors that create that variation.
This final report provides a brief narrative about what reliability is and how it can be measured and analyzed. A general finding is that reliability is best described by creating holistic pictures like probability density functions (PDFs) and their associated cumulative density functions (CDFs). PDFs are helpful for identifying multimodality or the existence of multiple operating conditions within the data being examined (Barkley et al. 2012; Guo et al. 2010; Fraley and Raftery 2009). CDFs are helpful for seeing if progress is being made in making a system more reliable or for comparing the reliability of one system against another.

The objective of this research are to build a set of performance measures that are unified, user-oriented, scalable, systematic, effective and calculable for intermodal freight management and to develop methodologies to calculate and use the measures.

This research aims to explore performance measures quantified based on different transportation data sources. It examined the major performance measures that can help describe both traffic operations and safety conditions. The available data sources that can be used to derive the performance measures were investigated. Particularly, performance measures related to travel time reliability, incident duration, and secondary crashes have been emphasized. Data-driven methodologies for performance quantification have been proposed for each category. Specifically, improved travel time estimation approaches based on probe vehicle data have been developed for traffic delays and travel time reliability analysis. Second, structure learning algorithms based on Bayesian Networks approach were proposed to mine incident records and predict incident durations that can be used for traffic incident management. Finally, both infrastructure sensor and virtual-sensor-based approaches have been developed to explore traffic sensor data as well as on-line traffic information for identifying secondary crashes. The results shown through the use of actual case studies illustrated that how key performance measures can be used to assess the performance of their systems. This research suggests that by mining existing traffic data sources, more performance measures can be more efficiently and accurately quantified without major expenditures in the deployment of new data collection technologies.