Conference Proceedings 26 - Transportation Research Board

128 PERFORMANCE MEASURES TO IMPROVE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS AND AGENCY OPERATIONSFIGURE 7Outcomes, indicators, and outputs.this list, then I look at your list, and I see how closethey are, but somehow California is never mentionedin any one of these studies. I have a chip on myshoulder about that.The reason these studies were conducted is that inCalifornia, we have Senate Bill 45 that permits, oractually provides, the regions their own decisionmaking on transportation improvements. So as thecommittee thought about which outcomes are criticalfor the state, they said we cannot decide for everyregion what is important. Let’s try to define a fairlywell-rounded number of outcomes, and let each regiondecide which outcome is critical to its own area.For instance, in Eureka, environmental quality—asdefined by pollution—may not be as critical as in LosAngeles, but it is one of the outcomes that we’relooking at.Now the trick here is to go from outputs to outcomes.There is no way to come up precisely with ameasure that reflects mobility for everybody. We cancome up with indicators that estimate, in general; thisidea seems to be less obvious to some than others.There is no way that delay and travel time areenough to talk about mobility for everybody. Wehave the curse of the average person. There is no suchthing as the average person. What we do is add upall the travel time divided by the number of peopleand say the average delay is X or the average traveltime is Y. That is not really what happens. But it isthe best we can do. If we wait until we have a perfectindicator that truly measures mobility, we may neverimplement performance measures.The same thing with reliability: We heard abouton-time performance for transit. Well, there is variationin travel time for highways. Now we figured away to say what percent variation do you see in yourcommute on a day-to-day basis, and we came upwith an indicator. It is not a measure that truly measuresreliability but an indicator that estimates reliability.Customers have told us that they understandthat in Los Angeles, they are not going to drive flowfree during the peak hours, but they want to have thetrip take 30 min today and maybe 32 min tomorrow,35 maximum—not 30 min today, 45 min, and then20 min. That is what we tried to capture.So we tackled outcomes, outputs, and indicators.We fully recognize that indicators are estimationmethods, possibly with the exception of customersatisfaction, because if you can do a good sampling,you may be able to get the true measure of customersatisfaction. That hasn’t been done yet. But all theothers are estimation. If a better one comes up thanthis indicator, there is no problem replacing the existingone or supplementing it.Finally, how do we hope to integrate performancemeasurement into decision making? (see Figure 8). Ifyou monitor and forecast, you provide that informationfor the long-range planning process at boththe state level and the regional level. We find themin both regional and statewide transportation improvementplans. The bottom line is decided byMPOs, more or less, with the blessing of the CaliforniaTransportation Commission. The top right oneis more the statewide interregional plan and is donewith the blessing of the governor (and so forth).One last comment: I’ve heard a lot during this sessionabout operations versus planning versus systemmanagement and so forth. We are really workinghard in California to make sure that there are oper-