Contractual Means of Achieving High-level Performance in Transit Contracts

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Legal Research Digest 43: Contractual Means of Achieving High-level Performance in Transit Contracts explores the use by transit agencies of performance-based provisions in their contracts and identifies legal and other restrictions on an agency’s use of incentives or liquidated damages in its contracts.

The report also examines how agencies determine the amounts of incentives and liquidated damages to specify in their contracts and whether there are any risks or adverse consequences associated with the use of clauses such as litigation, claims, delays, limiting of competition, problems in enforcement, and increased costs.

In addition, the report discusses the contractual provisions that have been successful and identifies practices that appear to be effective to achieve early or on-time performance.

The printed version of the report includes a CD-ROM that contains Appendix C--Index to Performance-based Clauses and Standards.

The CD-ROM is also available for download from TRB’s website as an ISO image. Links to the ISO image and instructions for burning a CD-ROM from an ISO image are provided below.

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