Transportation agencies implement projects to achieve an increasingly wide range of objectives, including congestion relief, multimodal safety, transit speed/reliability, encouragement of non-SOV trips, economic development, and user comfort. Yet, there is relatively little research documenting the quantitative impact of specific projects and project types on many of these goals (e.g., under what circumstances is removing on-street parking to install bicycle lanes likely to improve retail sales).
This lack of clarity reflects the fact that quantitative data on project impacts are collected for only a small portion of projects. Moreover, in those cases where data are collected methodologies differ widely between projects/agencies.
This research will develop a Guidebook for Multimodal Project Evaluation that (1) establishes standard methodologies for project evaluations; (2) addresses evaluation for a wide range of objectives; and (3) recognizes agency resource constraints. The research will focus on urban street retrofits to reconfigure constrained rights-of-way to achieve better outcomes.
Lack of clear evidence from similar projects is recognized by practitioners as one of the largest barriers to overcoming political barriers to improving multimodal mobility on urban streets. The successful completion of this research will encourage transportation agencies to collect more and better standardized data on the effect of transportation projects on stated objectives. More comparable data will allow for more accurate estimates of project effects during project planning and alternatives evaluation, in turn resulting in more effective projects.
$300,000
• NYC DOT retail sales before-after study • Variety of safety research (particularly road diet research) • TCRP 165: Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual • NCHRP 552: Guidelines for Analysis of Investment in Bicycle Facilities
The following set of tasks provide a draft research framework, subject to further refinement.
Task 1: Review State of the Practice • Review a representative range of recent projects to document commonly occurring project objectives. • Summarize available transportation performance metrics that address key project objectives. Each performance measure should be assessed based on applicability to various project objectives, ease of measurement, cost, reliability, data availability, and methodological consensus.
Task 2: Draft Methodology • Develop recommended project evaluation methodology(s) based on results of Task 1 review. • The recommended methodology(s) should reflect project objectives. For instance, the recommended evaluation methodology for a project intended exclusively to improve safety will differ from a project intended to improve economic vitality.
Task 3: Test and Refine Methodology • Apply methodology on a diverse range of real-world projects to assess costs, reliability, and practicality. • Refine methodology based on test results.
Task 4: Develop Draft and Final Guidebook • Produce a user-friendly Guidebooks for Multimodal Project Evaluation. The Guidebook should assist agencies to (1) identify appropriate performance metrics based on project-specific objectives and (2) provide cost-effective and reliable methods for collecting before-after project data to support quantitative and comparable project assessments.
This research need was identified at the 2016 TRB Annual Meeting as a part of the “Analyze This: What Planners Want to Know” workshop on Sunday January 10th. The workshop was attended by around 90 individuals from private industry, public service, federal, and non-governmental organizations and was sponsored by the ADB50 Standing Committee on Planning Applications.