Project Evaluation

This tool was created as a way to visualize all of the data being used in transportation project evaluations for the region. It is currently restricted to federally funded capacity projects, but we hope it will continue to grow until each project and its data are represented. The ARC wants to open up our data and our process used to evaluate projects for users to manipulate and compare. Process In order to fully understand this data you have to know where it came from. Here is a brief summary of what these data mean and how we calculated them. Need and Performance The current measures are all based on real world data where available. These measures determine the level of need and give a broad picture of what the conditions of the road are today. The future measures are all calculated by running each project through a transportation demand model, a process which calculates individual project performance for each measure. The current and future measures are then indexed, weighted and summed into a need score and a performance score, respectively. Benfit/Cost (BC) Ratios BC ratios monetize all of the costs and benefits of transportation projects to determine the overall value of each project. Since some projects are intended to solve current issues and some are meant to relieve anticipated problems, BC ratios for all projects were calculate for both 2015 and 2040 conditions. List of variables Project ID - ARC project identifier County - County of origin Cost in Millions - Total cost of project in millions of dollars 2015 Benefit in Millions - Monetary benefit of the project in millions if it is built in 2015 2040 Benefit in Millions - Monetary benefit of the project in millions if it is built in 2040 2015 Benefit/Cost - Benefit/Cost of project if it were built in 2015 2040 Benefit/Cost - Benefit/Cost of project if it were built in 2040 Current Congestion Index - Travel Time Index on project link Current Safety Index - Ratio of crash rate/ average crash rate by facility type Current Freight Index - Whether or not project lies within the ASTRO Network Current Reliability Index - Trip reliability on project link using Buffer Index Current Equity Index - Whether or not project lies within an ETA Current Air Quality Index - Average concentration of particulate matter around project link Current Accessibility Index - The percent of vehicles going to or coming from an activity center on the project link Current Need - The sum of the weighted current data points indicating need Future Congestion Index - Difference in VHD on the project link build-no build Future Accessibility Index - Difference in percent of vehicles going to or coming from an activity center on the project link build-no build Future Freight Index - Difference in truck VMT on link build-no build Future Deliverability Index - Total environmental obstacles along project links inversed so high value= high deliverability Future Air Quality Index - Difference in level of particulates regionally build-no build Future Volume Index - Volume/Mile categorized Future Performance - The sum of the weighted future data points indicating performance