Performance Measures

The need for Performance Measures in Road Network Operations (RNO) is widely recognised. They have been a topic of discussion for many years but it is only recently that ITS devices provided the data necessary to support performance measures and their importance in RNO. (See  Performance Indicators)

ITS can play a major role in performance measurement and will be useful to countries that do not already have strong road network performance management programmes. Performance management is important to ensure that:

• the transport agency achieves its goals and objectives
• systems deployed are cost effective
• managers and operators get feedback so they can assess how effective their actions have been and what changes may be needed to their plans
• the return on investment is positive in terms of road-user benefits
• performance measurements are consistent across the country, or even regional group of nations, if appropriate
• performance measurements are increasingly outcome-based rather than output (production)

Possible categories of performance measures relevant to RNO include:

• performance of the strategic highways viewed from the operational perspective (not strictly physical condition) – for example, measures of journey time reliability
• traffic incidents – collisions/incident rates and the incidence of secondary collisions
• incident severity – for example incident duration, numbers killed and seriously injured
• traffic congestion – for example an ITS-based measure reflecting accumulated traffic delays
• on-road mobile source emissions – using environmental sensors as the data collection mechanism
• freight movements on strategic highways