BACKGROUND

The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Planning and Environment Linkages (PEL) Program represents a collaborative and integrated approach to transportation decision-making that (1) considers environmental, community, and economic goals early in the transportation planning process, and (2) uses the information, analysis, and products developed during planning to inform the environmental review process. Using PEL, state and local agencies can incorporate environmental and community values into transportation decisions early in planning and carry these considerations through project development and delivery. To deploy PEL, FHWA developed numerous resources on the topic, conducted interviews with selected state departments of transportation (DOTs) regarding their PEL implementation, and documented key takeaways from those discussions. NCHRP Legal Research Digest 89: Planning and Environment Linkages: Review of Statutory Authority and Case Law highlights key statutory and regulatory authorities for PEL and corresponding agency guidance and policy; it also includes a description and comparison of the various approaches to PEL at the federal and state levels.

The FHWA Research & Technology (R&T) evaluation program was initiated in 2013 to assess and communicate the value and effectiveness of FHWA R&T investment. The objective of the R&T evaluation program is to document the impact of the projects, demonstrate accountability to funders and policymakers, and identify lessons learned and best practices that can be applied to future projects/programs, thus completing the innovation lifecycle.  The Transportation Research Board (TRB), in collaboration with the FHWA, is overseeing the TRB/FHWA Program Evaluation (TFPE) to evaluate such programs. There is a need to evaluate the PEL program to establish the degree of efficiency, implementation, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and attribution to assess and communicate its value. Through TFPE, an evaluation report could assess the benefits of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) project development and cost savings of a PEL study or process, and it could also highlight challenges of the PEL program.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this research is to develop and execute an evaluation plan for the FHWA’s PEL program to answer these fundamental questions:

• Efficiency: Are the PEL program’s activities conducted with an appropriate use of resources, such as budget and staff time (e.g., research and implementation approach, funding level)?
• Implementation: Is the PEL program being applied and/or adopted by the users (e.g., change in culture, state of the practice)? If yes, how is it being applied or adopted? Considering a variety of implementation stages (e.g., more advanced, moderately advanced, or less advanced), how advanced are the DOTs in terms of their PEL program implementation stage? How has the PEL program been implemented into programs across the state (e.g., some states may be decentralized, and some districts may be more robust than others)?
• Effectiveness: Is the PEL program achieving the goals and objectives it was intended to accomplish (e.g., impact)? What data sets will be used to measure effectiveness?
• Cost-effectiveness: Does the value or benefit of achieving the PEL program’s goals and objectives exceed the cost of producing them (e.g., return on investment and cost-benefit ratio)?
• Attribution: Is the PEL program addressing FHWA’s strategic goals (e.g., outcome, streamlining the process)?

STATUS

Research is in progress.