Quantifying the Benefits of Context Sensitive Solutions (2009)

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3Problem Statement In recent years, Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) has been promoted by both AASHTO and FHWA as a best practice. CSS provides a systematic and comprehensive approach to project development from inception and planning through operations and maintenance. Its goal is to achieve a project development process that provides an outcome harmonizing transportation requirements with community needs and val- ues. CSS aims to address the question “How do people in this community want to live” before investigating mobility and access solutions. The ability to categorize and measure the broad scope of benefits within projects is vital to the long-term success of CSS in meeting livability and mobility goals. Trans- portation agencies currently lack the capability and tools that allow them to accomplish this. The development of perform- ance measures will enable evaluation of the benefits of the process and allow state and local transportation agencies to gauge the value of employing CSS and the progress they are making to improve project development. A key factor in developing benefit evaluation tools is the recognition that transportation projects are unique in terms of the nature, scope and importance of issues addressed. Those impact project purpose and need, community and environ- mental concerns, topographic and geometric conditions, traf- fic, safety history, and other public priorities. Moreover, there are guiding principles for CSS and a core of essential elements common to most projects. Those should be identified and con- sidered when conducting CSS project benefit evaluations, since such principles are the cornerstone of the unique project solu- tions to be developed. A range of measures must be examined to determine those most appropriate for assessing various types of project results and benefits. Research Objectives and Approach The objective of this project is to develop a guide for trans- portation officials and professionals that identifies a compre- hensive set of performance measures of CSS principles and quantifies the resulting benefits through all phases of project development. This research effort will provide transportation agencies with CSS project examples and tools for identifying and quantifying the benefits of applying CSS principles. To address CSS performance measures, a two-phased ap- proach was developed. The first phase involved a review of literature, review of existing (documented) case studies, identification of potential examples, and the development of a methodology for data collection and analysis to be used. In the second phase, the selected example cases were eval- uated and analyzed using measurement tools developed and applied to determine the benefits of CSS in a range of contexts. Specifically, the work was completed through the following tasks accomplished in two phases: Phase I • Task 1: Review of literature and research work relevant to quantification of CSS benefits in transportation planning, programming project development and operations, and identification of potential case studies for review. • Task 2: Development of a work plan to quantify benefits of CSS applications in a range of examples among those identified in Task 1. • Task 3: Development of an interim report and work plan. Phase II • Task 4: Acquisition of the appropriate case study data and analysis of the data to estimate CSS benefits. • Task 5: Development of guidelines that could be used by professionals in applying CSS principles and estimating benefits from their application. • Task 6: Preparation of final report. This research envisioned the estimation of the benefits from the application of the CSS approach. The team accomplished this by first establishing the action principles required to accrue benefits for CSS projects and then developed a process that C H A P T E R 1 Introduction and Research Approach

allows transportation agencies to systematically collect data to accomplish such evaluations. This process is envisioned to be applied in all types and sizes of projects. The use of case stud- ies to determine and estimate benefits resulted in a forensic approach, which proved to be a difficult process to obtain suf- ficient data to allow for a comprehensive estimation of such benefits. Consequently, this research strongly suggests a more concurrent time-linked approach for estimating the benefits to accrue from the application of CSS principles. Moreover, this research identified steps to be taken and good practices that could be followed in order to improve the use of a principle- based, benefit-justified process. Therefore, the results pre- sented here provide the foundation for a continuous perform- ance evaluation and opportunity for process improvement for transportation agencies using CSS. Organization of the Report This report documents the findings of the research work completed in establishing a procedure for identifying CSS principles and measuring associated benefits from CSS appli- cations. The results of this research are included along with rec- ommendations for future research. The components of this report are as follows: • Chapter 2 Literature Synthesis—presents the current knowl- edge on benefits and other issues relative to CSS approach. • Chapter 3 Research Approach—documents the method- ology followed to develop the approach and analyze the collected data. • Chapter 4 Findings—includes a discussion of principles and benefits developed and presents the framework for estimating benefits as well as results from the analysis. • Chapter 5 Guidelines—presents the proposed guidelines for the CSS principles and benefits as a result of this research. • Chapter 6 Conclusions—includes a summary of the study objectives, project findings, and recommendations for future research work. 4