Management and Use of Data for Transportation Performance Management: Guide for Practitioners

Recent federal legislation has established requirements for agencies to set performance targets and report on safety, pavement, and bridge conditions; transit asset state of good repair; system performance; freight; and mobile source emissions. These requirements have resulted in increased visibility and attention to Transportation Performance Management (TPM) and increased awareness of the importance of data within that process.

The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Report 920: Management and Use of Data for Transportation Performance Management: Guide for Practitioners provides practical guidance to transportation agencies to help improve their use of data for performance management.

The guidance is organized around six data life-cycle stages and includes a discussion of what is involved in implementing each step and some of the critical choices to be made; a synthesis of key points in the form of “Dos and Don’ts” checklists that can be used to assess agency capabilities and identify opportunities for improvement; and illustrative examples.

While this guide draws on many examples related to the federally defined TPM areas (safety, pavement, bridge, and system performance), it does not provide official guidance for MAP-21/FAST Act target setting or reporting. It provides a framework for assessing current data management practices and a source of ideas for practice improvement. Its purpose is to promote practices that will enable agencies to go beyond meeting reporting requirements, to get valuable insights from data that can be used to boost agency results.

An additional resource to the guide is a downloadable report: Developing National Performance Management Data Strategies to Address Data Gaps, Standards, and Quality: Final Research Report.