Urban Partnership Agreement and Congestion Reduction Demonstration: National Evaluation Framework

This report provides an analytical framework for evaluating six deployments under the United States Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) Urban Partnership Agreement (UPA) and Congestion Reduction Demonstration (CRD) Programs. The six UPA/CRD sites are Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Minnesota, San Francisco, and Seattle. Those sites are seeking to reduce congestion by employing strategies consisting of combinations of tolling, transit, telecommuting/TDM, and technology, also known as the 4 Ts. The national evaluation framework identifies the major questions to be answered through the evaluation; the approach to be used to address those questions; and risks to the evaluation and how they will be mitigated. Four objective questions posed by U.S. DOT serve as a starting point for the evaluation framework: how much congestion was reduced; what contributed to the reduction and what were the associated impacts; what lessons were learned about nontechnical factors for success; and what were the overall cost and benefit of the congestion reduction strategies. The four objective questions were translated into twelve evaluation analyses, which in turn consist of hypotheses and questions, measures of effectiveness (MOEs), and data required for the MOEs. This document explains each of the twelve analyses and discusses the major data requirements and data collection methods that will be needed. Next steps include development of site-specific evaluation plans and test plans.