BACKGROUND
Highway traffic congestion is one of the biggest challenges facing transportation agencies today. Congestion will likely become even worse in the future as demand for highway facilities increases and capacity remains limited. Increasing peak times, loss of productivity during congested periods, and underutilization of existing capacity during off peak periods are some of the current system management challenges.
There is a growing national momentum within government transportation agencies to explore congestion pricing and evaluate its performance. A number of states are considering or implementing congestion pricing projects such as High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes.Congestion pricing options face considerable political and public pressures. Transportation organizations need assistance in developing and tracking measurements for assessing the benefits and impacts of congestion pricing strategies. Effective performance assessment of pricing projects is essential at the planning, development, deployment, operation, and evaluation stages.
The objective of this research was to create guidelines for evaluation and performance measurement of congestion pricing projects that are designed to optimize the use of available roadway capacity. The guidelines will help agencies select or develop appropriate performance measures, collect the necessary data, track performance, and communicate the results to decision-makers, users, and the general public. As well as the guidelines, the products include a web-only document which provides an overview of the purpose, scope, and methodology, and a complete compilation of the work products that were used to develop NCHRP Report 694.
The Guidelines and companion web document are available here.
