Institute for Transportation

About the research

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are planning bodies responsible for assisting state departments of transportation (DOTs) in planning and programming activities in urban areas in a manner that supports achieving performance targets for areas, including safety, infrastructure asset condition (pavement and bridge conditions), transit asset condition, transit safety, system reliability, congestion, freight, and air quality. Depending on their technical capacity and organizational maturity, MPOs may either adopt the state’s performance targets and federally required measures only or develop their own. Regardless of the approach, MPOs are required to document performance measures and targets in a Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP). Furthermore, the connection between these targets and project programming must be clearly demonstrated in four-year Transportation Improvement Plans (TIPs) and one-year Unified Planning Work Program (UPWP). Advanced MPOs monitor progress toward targets using in-house or state-supported performance dashboards. Performance-based planning and programming (PBPP) serves as the overarching framework that links the identification of performance measures, the setting of performance targets, and the tracking of outcomes. It provides the foundation upon which MPOs should develop and align their planning and programming activities.

Illinois has MPOs spanning a wide spectrum of performance measures implementation maturity. While some MPOs, such as the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and Champaign Urbana Urban Area Transportation Study (CUUATS), have developed robust tools and performance tracking systems, others have limited performance measures implementation practices and treat the process as a check-the-box requirement due to limited data, resources, staff capacity, among many other challenges. Consequently, these MPOs barely meet the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) requirements without embracing a performance management culture, which diminishes the benefits gained from these processes. Thus, this research aims to develop a guide that will help Illinois MPOs in implementing performance measures more effectively. The focus will be on supporting MPOs in defining meaningful performance measures and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) targets, establishing policies and investment strategies aligned with these targets, and conducting post-implementation performance monitoring and evaluation to track the progress achieved toward the targets. This project will ultimately equip the Illinois DOT with tools and strategies to better support MPO performance measures implementation from organizational and technical standpoints. This will necessitate identifying the nationwide performance measures implementation (i.e., PBPP) state-of-art and best practices, identifying challenges faced by Illinois MPOs, and pairing these challenges with the best practices through an actionable list of strategies.