Operations Performance Measurement
What's New
Urban Congestion Report (UCR) for January – March 2013 (HTML, PDF 349KB) is now available. The Urban Congestion Report (UCR) is produced on a quarterly basis and characterizes emerging traffic congestion and reliability trends at the national and city level.
The 2012 Urban Congestion Trends report is now available. The report provides a snapshot of urban congestion trends, including travel time reliability, in 19 urban areas in the U.S. The report also highlights operational solutions that provide benefits to system operators and the traveling public. The report can be accessed here.
Featured Item
Operations Performance Measures are a powerful tool for system operators and planners, for reaching out to the public and for decision makers deciding how to spend precious funding on our nation's highways. The Office of Operations has put together a brochure explaining the power of Operations Performance Measures in more detail. The new brochure is titled Operations Performance Measures: The Foundation for Performance-Based Management of Transportation Operations Programs and is available here.
Performance measurement is the use of evidence to determine progress toward specific defined organizational objectives. This includes both quantitative evidence (such as the measurement of customer travel times) and qualitative evidence (such as the measurement of customer satisfaction and customer perceptions).
Operations performance measurement, therefore, measures progress toward meeting the objectives of transportation system management and operations. Although the specific objectives of management and operations activities vary among organizations, most relate to the overall goals of transportation mobility, productivity, and safety.
The FHWA Office of Operations is leading numerous activities to advance the implementation and practice of operations performance measurement at the Federal, State, and local level:
- Urban Congestion Reports
A quarterly snapshot of traffic congestion and reliability trends at the national and city level, developed using archived traffic operations data. - Urban Congestion Trends and Related Reports
Technical reports that communicate recent trends in congestion as well as strategies to manage congestion and improve mobility. - Travel Time Reliability Measures
Guidance documents on the need for, calculation of, and implementation of travel time reliability measures.
The following pages provide links to information and resources to assist in implementing operations performance measurement:
