Spatially Referenced Probe Data Performance Measures for Infrastructure Investment Decision Makers

Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, the recently enacted highway bill, challenges transportation professionals to develop a comprehensive set of performance measures for managing most aspects of the transportation system. Historically, performance metrics have been created on an agency-by-agency basis with little consistency between data collection frequency and quality. In recent years, crowdsourced data have become a high-fidelity data source that could be used to develop spatially oriented performance measures that could scale nationwide. This paper summarizes the rapidly evolving literature on probe vehicle data and proposes a series of performance measures to characterize the temporal and spatial aspects of congestion in a graphical manner that decision makers may use to evaluate the impact of past investments and prioritize future investments. The I-80-I-94 corridor in northwest Indiana, near Chicago, Illinois, is used to present the methodologies. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these techniques can be extended on a national scale to characterize corridors such as I-80 from New York to California.