Modeling Best Practices in Transportation

1. Modeling Best Practices in Transportation Jon Malpass Director, Decision Solutions

2. Agenda • Common Decision Lens uses • Transportation model review & analysis • A model template • Challenges in using Decision Lens

3. Decision Lens uses • Capital planning • Long range transportation plans • Transportation improvement programs • Vendor selections • Engineering design selection • Performance management • For what other kinds of decision have you used Decision Lens?

4. Summary of Model Analysis • Conducted review of 14 transportation industry models from 12 organizations focusing on capital investment, transportation improvement and long range plans • Mixture of transit agency models and those from state/local transportation organizations (DOTs and MPOs/RPOs) • Many models had similar concepts represented, but not always at the same level of the hierarchy or explicitly using the same words • Required a bit of abstraction to higher level concepts based on common clustering

5. Commonly Used Criteria

6. Criterion usage and weights

7. Cause and effect • Decision Lens modeling often forces clients to grapple with chicken or egg-type quandaries • Criteria may have cause and effect relationships, where one criterion might impact or benefit another • Distinction can make a difference in a model by resulting in overweighting

8. Safety & Security • How do you differentiate between safety and security? • Where does response factor in? • Sometimes also focused on who (patron, employee, system) as opposed to what

9. Measuring the Impact of Safety & Security • How does one measure the impact of a safety and security-focused investment? • Often scales for these concepts were quite generic • Makes it difficult to differentiate the amount of the impact • What about a broad impact that’s unlikely? • A narrow but severe impact? • Better scales will… • Reference documented safety & security issues • Differentiate between the scope and impact of the potential risk or solution

10. Service Quality • Specifics are tailored to each customer need, but the concept of improving the service provided is common • Most used children include: • Meeting performance objectives • Accessibility & mobility • Customer satisfaction • System improvements

11. State of Good Repair / Condition • Definitions related to SGR varied • Replaces an asset at or past its useful life • Evaluates the project need based on asset condition • Keeps assets in SGR ensuring safety and customer wellbeing • Rehabs, upgrades or replaces assets to maintain serviceability • Lifecycle status of an investment based on pre-determined life expectancy and conditions • Started research into what this means – and therefore how we think it should be used in models

12. What does SGR mean? • Maintaining the nation's bus and rail systems in a State of Good Repair (SGR) is essential if public transportation systems are to provide safe and reliable service to millions of daily riders. • In a country where public transportation is increasingly looked to as a necessary and critical mode of travel, ensuring that local transit systems are maintained in a “state of good repair” to provide efficient, reliable, and safe service is more important than ever. Source: FTA, Transit State of Good Repair , Beginning the Dialogue, October 2008

13. FTA Working Group Definition • SGR is a framework based on four attributes: • Age of the asset • Asset condition • Asset performance • Backlog of maintenance/deferred maintenance • Does this framework create an overlap with other criteria in the model? • How can we differentiate?

14. Do you need SGR to be… • Safe? • Reliable? • Efficient? • Environmentally friendly? Financial Efficiencies SGR Safety Environmental Service Quality

15. Environmental Impact • Criterion seeks to lower the overall impact of transportation system on the environment • Focus areas include resource conservation or reduction in use of natural resources • Reduction in VMT – in both transit and transportation models • Impact of the project on the community environment

16. External Impact • Speaks to the larger set of benefits that a strong transportation system can provide outside of the moving of people from one location to another • Partnerships • Community investment • Economic return • Livability • Impact to public

17. Financial Effectiveness • Financial impact or benefit from the investment within the system • Focuses predominately on the extent to which the project would increase revenue or reduce costs • Also includes ability to improve efficiencies within the organization providing the service

18. Notes & Comments on Other Criteria • Volume & route significance only appeared in transportation models, not transit. Why? • Increased ridership only explicitly appeared in two models as evaluation criteria but also as parent criteria in two other models. Does this have the same dependency as seen before?

19. What does a comprehensive model look like? • Includes many of the most common and important criteria • Requires children criteria and specific definitions to differentiate • Does not need to be the largest model to be comprehensive • Uses scales to define breadth and depth of criterion

20. Dealing with large models – model size • Models are often revised year to year, even with the same decision or type • Commonly used to reduce the time it takes to use the Decision Lens process • How to improve your model while downsizing? • Improve your definitions • Build better scales

21. Dealing with large models - ratings • Rate all alternatives in a group session - Ideal • Next best options – get as close to that ideal as possible • Have people rate on their own, but still rating each alternative for each criterion; conduct discussion for cases of extreme outliers/disagreement • Break your evaluations by criteria, alternatives or a combination

22. Challenges faced when using Decision Lens • What were your main challenges? • How did you overcome them? • What do you plan to do differently next time?