Conference Proceedings 26 - Transportation Research Board

Panel Discussion, Part 1Anita Vandervalk, Florida Department of TransportationPaul O’Brien, Utah Transit AuthorityJoel Pfundt, Puget Sound Regional CouncilTom Brigham, Alaska Department of Transportation, ModeratorTRB AND FLORIDA EXAMPLESAnita VandervalkThe goal of this presentation is to confirm manyof the points in the resource paper by a comparisonwith the outcome of the TransportationResearch Board (TRB) data committee peerexchange and of the Florida experience.At the end of July, the TRB data committee helda peer exchange in which nine states gathered alongwith staff from TRB and the Federal Highway Administration(FHWA). We had a good exchangeabout the latest developments and performancemeasures. We focused on data issues. So a lot of theoutcome of that peer exchange is similar to thepoints made in the resource paper. (Note that a copyof the report on the peer exchange is found in AppendixB.)I will not go into too much detail about Florida’sperformance measures because we have been doingthis for 10 years and much has been written aboutour program. I want to draw on some examples tovalidate the points. One of the keys about the performancemeasure program is that it is closely linkedto our planning process, which I will demonstrate ina moment. Then I’m going to propose some additionalareas of study, most of which came from thepeer exchange.There was no question-and-answer period for this session. Thesummaries were prepared by Jonette Kreidweis, Minnesota Departmentof Transportation.I decided to break the points of the paper intothree main areas: agency performance measures, customerneeds and data, and—most important—datafor performance measures. For each area, I have chosena couple of points to highlight and go intodetail.The paper pointed out that agency performancemeasures should be focused on three groups: customers,stakeholders, and employees. I would like to takethat focus a little farther and emphasize that we needto look at how performance measures are used. Thisis something we discussed at length in the peerexchange. We all realize that there is a flurry of activity.We all think we are doing the right thing indeveloping these performance measures. But we needsome examples of how performance measures havecontributed to making decisions in an agency, organizationaland institutional changes, and how theyrelate to operations. We also talked about that in ourbreakout group.A second point on agency performance measuresis the number of measures. This is one point where Idisagree with the paper’s authors. They indicated thatthere should be a few of them. In Florida and Minnesota,where there are hundreds of measures, it isimportant to have a lot of measures. I do agree thatyou need to be able to boil them down to a few keyones that you report out with, but to get the buy-in,you need to have measures that cover every area ofevery agency so that everybody is involved.When we were mandated by our legislature in1994 to have measures in place, we looked out intothe agency to determine how we could report to thelegislature on this. We found that a lot of the areas88