All MPO areas and State agencies have long range plan development processes that include evaluating and ranking of projects by performance. The challenge is to be able to efficiently evaluate each project separately or combine multiple projects to evaluate the performance of scenarios.

This presentation will focus on the use of customized tools to standardize the evaluations, increase the number of projects that can be evaluated and produce easily understandable performance measures for visualization and comparison. In addition, it will include suggestions for MPOs and DOTs on potential measures to use in the evaluations, best practices on managing the data and things to consider when applying or implementing similar processes.

The presentation is based on work for NCDOTs project prioritization process where 1500 projects were evaluated in less than 6 weeks. The series of tools developed for their process includes automatic looping through each project in a database, the production of automated outputs of travel time, VHT, and VMT summaries, and automated visualization of each project with the attributes of the coded project visually displayed. In addition, it compares the coded project attributes to the master sheet to assure accurate coding, it flags issues where low volumes exist from the model run so that the reviewers are aware of projects that need additional manual review. The final tool goes through the project folders and produces a master evaluation summary in csv format.

This presentation will help MPOs and State agencies improve their project prioritization evaluation using their travel demand models.