Using New Data Sources to Meet MAP-21 Requirements for Performance-Based Planning: National Capital Region’s Experience in Monitoring Congestion and Reliability

The newly enacted transportation law, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) of the United States, has set up new requirements for performance-based transportation decision making, including establishing performance measures and targets in seven national goal areas such as congestion reduction and system reliability. To meet the new requirements, transportation agencies may face a “data gap” (e.g. insufficient data or lack of standardization of data) and a “performance measures gap” (e.g., to identify appropriate performance measures that can be shared regionally or nationally) in monitoring highway congestion and reliability. As an early adopter of emerging proprietary probe-based traffic data archive analysis, the National Capital Region’s metropolitan planning organization (MPO) has applied the data in a number of planning activities and developed hierarchical congestion and reliability performance measures that could not be produced in the past due to lack of data. This hierarchical performance measures framework features traveler delay as the overarching congestion measure and standard deviation of travel time as the overarching reliability measure. The probe-based speed data and detector-based volume data were integrated to provide personal and vehicular measures, including delay and vehicle miles traveled. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of private sector probe-based data in supporting the MAP-21 requirements, including both technical details and application experience with the hierarchical highway performance measures, feedback from the general public, and lessons learned.