Performance-Based Planning and Asset Management

Traditional transportation planning identifies and prioritizes investment needs in system facilities and operations over a 20-year period. A performance-based approach to planning focuses on the projected outcomes of potential investments and the degree to which these impacts support stated policies. Interest in performance-based planning has grown in response to changing demands on agencies’ transportation programs resulting from international trade and economic competition, deregulation and modal competition, environmental regulation, and the pluralistic nature of many transportation decision-making processes. Performance-based planning is systematic and analytic, building upon the following components: expressions of policy in terms of quantifiable objectives; explicit measures of system performance; analytic methods to predict the impacts of different types of investments on system performance; decision-support tools to assist in evaluating a range of investments throughout a transportation network; models for periodic system monitoring to track performance measures; and feedback mechanisms to assess performance trends and identify needed adjustments in investment priorities.