Making Transportation Decisions Work: The Rise of Performance Management at DOTs

by Jamie M. Fischer

The term “performance management” refers to a business practice that allows an organization to track, maintain, and when necessary improve its products or services. It has two key operating principles: (1) formulating performance measures that relate to the organization’s goals; and (2) using performance information in decision making. Each of these principles poses specific challenges to transportation agencies such as state Departments of Transportation (DOTs). However, the field of transportation planning and engineering is moving towards performance-based business practice in the coming years.

Performance management is similar to the practice of quality control in manufacturing, where factory staff checks their products for any defects before letting them out of the factory and onto sales floors. However, in the case of transportation services, the “products” don’t really exist until people use them, by choosing to travel or demanding deliveries. Therefore, the goals of a transportation agency often relate to impacts on people, either directly or through the environment. For example, the mission of the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) is to provide a “safe, seamless and sustainable transportation system that supports Georgia’s economy and is sensitive to its citizens and environment.” According to the first principle of performance management, this mission implies that GDOT should use performance measures related to safety, mobility, economic and community development, and environmental impact.

Many DOTs lack the comprehensive set of performance measures that would be necessary to address all of their strategic goals. Whereas some performance measurement areas have been well established for decades, others are entirely unaddressed. Commonly used transportation performance measures include crash rates to address safety, which can be easily collected from police reports, and the bridge condition index, which was mandated by federal law in the 1960s. Mobility measures, such as travel delay, are less wide spread because they require more complex data collection and analysis. Economic and environmental measures are scarce, and community development measures are virtually absent from the current practice.

Based on the second operating principle of performance management, DOTs must learn to use performance information to make investment and policy decisions. For example, safety and congestion data could help the DOT to decide on intersection improvements that prevent crashes or improve traffic flow, or on a new initiative in driver education. To apply this second principle, not only must DOTs have useful performance measures, but they must also have developed processes for communicating performance outcomes to decision makers.

Despite the challenges with implementation, performance management is gaining acclaim among transportation agencies. It is seen as a tool for increasing the benefits of investments and the sense of trust and accountability among transportation agencies and the people they serve. For these reasons, performance management is expected to be discussed in the next federal transportation funding bill and to become the standard practice for making effective transportation decisions at DOTs in the future.