I n t e r n at i onal T echnology Scann i ng Program

Sponsored by

In cooperation with

American Association of State Highway 

and Transportation Officials

National Cooperative Highway 

Research Program

April 2010

Australia Great Britain New Zealand  Sweden

Linking Transportation

Performance

and Accountability
NOTICE

The Federal Highway Administration provides high-quality 

information to serve Government, industry, and the public 

in a manner that promotes public understanding. Standards 

and policies are used to ensure and maximize the quality, 

objectivity, utility, and integrity of its information. FHWA 

periodically reviews quality issues and adjusts its programs 

and processes to ensure continuous quality improvement.
1. Report No.

FHWA-PL-10-011

2. Government Accession No. 3. Recipient’s Catalog No.

4. Title and Subtitle

Linking Transportation Performance and 

Accountability

5. Report Date

April 2010

6. Performing Organization Code

7. Author(s) 

Carlos M. Braceras, Robert F. Tally, Jr., 

Gordon Proctor, Daniela Bremmer, Leon E. Hank, 

Jane Hayse, Dr. Anthony R. Kane, Dr. Kristine L. 

Leiphart, James W. March, Steven M. Pickrell, 

Dr. J. Woody Stanley, Jenne Van der Velde, 

Connie P. Yew

8. Performing Organization Report No.

9. Performing Organization Name and Address

American Trade Initiatives

P.O. Box 8228

Alexandria, VA 22306-8228

10. Work Unit No. (TRAIS)

11. Contract or Grant No.

DTFH61-99-C-005

12. Sponsoring Agency Name and Address

Office of International Programs

Federal Highway Administration

U.S. Department of Transportation

American Association of State Highway 

 and Transportation Officials

13. Type of Report and Period Covered

14. Sponsoring Agency Code

15. Supplementary Notes

FHWA COTR: Hana Maier, Office of International Programs

16. Abstract

It is becoming essential in the United States for transportation agencies to demonstrate credibility with 

elected officials and the public. The Federal Highway Administration, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and National Cooperative Highway Research Program sponsored a scanning study of how transportation agencies in other countries apply performance management programs.

The scan team found that the nations it studied articulate a limited number of national transportation policy 

goals, negotiate intergovernmental agreements on how state, regional, and local agencies will achieve the 

goals, and evaluate performance by tracking the measures and reporting them in clear language appropriate 

to the audience.

The team developed an implementation plan that includes outreach efforts to disseminate scan findings and 

put international best practices into use in the United States and research efforts to translate some aspects of 

the best practices into useful American context. 

17. Key Words

Accountability, benefit-cost analysis, performance 

management, performance measurement, policy 

goals, risk management, value for money

18. Distribution Statement

No restrictions. This document is available to the 

public from the: Office of International Programs, 

FHWA-HPIP, Room 3325, U.S. Department of 

Transportation, Washington, DC 20590

international@fhwa.dot.gov

www.international.fhwa.dot.gov

19. Security Classify. (of this report)

Unclassified

20. Security Classify. (of this page)

Unclassified

21. No. of Pages

92

22. Price

Free

Form DOT F 1700.7 (8-72) Reproduction of completed page authorized

Technical Report Documentation Page
Linking Transportation

Performance

and Accountability

Dr. Anthony R. Kane

AASHTO

Dr. Kristine L. Leiphart

Federal Transit Administration

James W. March

FHWA

Steven M. Pickrell

Cambridge Systematics, Inc.

Dr. J. Woody Stanley

FHWA

Jenne Van der Velde

Dutch Ministry of Transport, 

Public Works, and Water

Management

Connie P. Yew

FHWA

for

Federal Highway Administration

U.S. Department of Transportation 

American Association of State 

Highway and Transportation 

Officials

National Cooperative Highway 

Research Program

April 2010

Prepared by the International Scanning Study Team:

Carlos M. Braceras (Cochair)

Utah DOT

Robert F. Tally, Jr. (Cochair)

FHWA

Gordon Proctor 

(Report Facilitator)

Gordon Proctor & Associates, Inc.

Daniela Bremmer

Washington State DOT

Leon E. Hank

Michigan DOT

Jane Hayse

Atlanta Regional Commission
iv INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SCANNING PROGRAM

International Technology

Scanning Program

The International Technology Scanning Program, 

sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration 

(FHWA), the American Association of State 

Highway and Transportation Officials 

(AASHTO), and the National Cooperative Highway 

Research Program (NCHRP), evaluates innovative foreign 

technologies and practices that could significantly benefit 

U.S. highway transportation systems. This approach allows 

advanced technology to be adapted and put into practice 

much more efficiently without spending scarce research funds 

to re-create advances already developed by other countries.

FHWA and AASHTO, with recommendations from 

NCHRP, jointly determine priority topics for teams of U.S. 

experts to study. Teams in the specific areas being investigated 

are formed and sent to countries where significant advances 

and innovations have been made in technology, management 

practices, organizational structure, program delivery, and 

financing. Scan teams usually include representatives from 

FHWA, State departments of transportation, local governments, transportation trade and research groups, the private 

sector, and academia. 

After a scan is completed, team members evaluate findings 

and develop comprehensive reports, including recommendations for further research and pilot projects to verify the value 

of adapting innovations for U.S. use. Scan reports, as well as 

the results of pilot programs and research, are circulated 

throughout the country to State and local transportation 

officials and the private sector. Since 1990, more than 80 

international scans have been organized on topics such as 

pavements, bridge construction and maintenance, contracting, intermodal transport, organizational management, 

winter road maintenance, safety, intelligent transportation 

systems, planning, and policy. 

The International Technology Scanning Program has resulted 

in significant improvements and savings in road program 

technologies and practices throughout the United States. 

In some cases, scan studies have facilitated joint research and 

technology-sharing projects with international counterparts, 

further conserving resources and advancing the state of the 

art. Scan studies have also exposed transportation professionals to remarkable advancements and inspired implementation 

of hundreds of innovations. The result: large savings of 

research dollars and time, as well as significant improvements 

in the Nation’s transportation system.

Scan reports can be obtained through FHWA free of 

charge by e-mailing international@dot.gov. Scan reports 

are also available electronically and can be accessed on 

the FHWA Office of International Programs Web site 

at www.international.fhwa.dot.gov. 

International Technology

Scanning Program
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY v

Safety 

Assuring Bridge Safety and Serviceability in Europe (2010)

Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety and Mobility in Europe (2010)

Improving Safety and Mobility for Older Road Users in 

Australia and Japan (2008)

Halving Roadway Fatalities: A Case Study From Victoria, 

Australia (2008)

Safety Applications of Intelligent Transportation Systems in 

Europe and Japan (2006)

Traffic Incident Response Practices in Europe (2006)

Underground Transportation Systems in Europe: Safety, 

Operations, and Emergency Response (2006)

Roadway Human Factors and Behavioral Safety in Europe

(2005) 

Traffic Safety Information Systems in Europe and Australia

(2004) 

Signalized Intersection Safety in Europe (2003) 

Managing and Organizing Comprehensive Highway Safety in 

Europe (2003) 

European Road Lighting Technologies (2001) 

Commercial Vehicle Safety, Technology, and Practice in Europe

(2000) 

Methods and Procedures to Reduce Motorist Delays in European 

Work Zones (2000) 

Innovative Traffic Control Technology and Practice in Europe

(1999) 

Road Safety Audits—Final Report and Case Studies (1997) 

Speed Management and Enforcement Technology: 

Europe and Australia (1996) 

Safety Management Practices in Japan, Australia, 

and New Zealand (1995) 

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety in England, Germany, 

and the Netherlands (1994) 

Planning and Environment 

Linking Transportation Performance and Accountability (2010)

Streamlining and Integrating Right-of-Way and Utility 

Processes With Planning, Environmental, and Design 

Processes in Australia and Canada (2009)

Active Travel Management: The Next Step in Congestion 

Management (2007)

Managing Travel Demand: Applying European Perspectives to 

U.S. Practice (2006)

Risk Assessment and Allocation for Highway Construction 

Management (2006)

Transportation Asset Management in Australia, Canada, 

England, and New Zealand (2005)

Transportation Performance Measures in Australia, Canada, 

Japan, and New Zealand (2004) 

European Right-of-Way and Utilities Best Practices (2002) 

Geometric Design Practices for European Roads (2002) 

Wildlife Habitat Connectivity Across European Highways

(2002) 

Sustainable Transportation Practices in Europe (2001) 

Recycled Materials in European Highway Environments

(1999) 

European Intermodal Programs: Planning, Policy, 

and Technology (1999) 

National Travel Surveys (1994) 

Policy and Information 

Transportation Research Program Administration in Europe 

and Asia (2009)

European Practices in Transportation Workforce Development

(2003) 

Intelligent Transportation Systems and Winter Operations 

in Japan (2003) 

Emerging Models for Delivering Transportation Programs 

and Services (1999) 

National Travel Surveys (1994) 

Acquiring Highway Transportation Information From Abroad

(1994) 

International Guide to Highway Transportation Information

(1994) 

International Contract Administration Techniques for Quality 

Enhancement (1994) 

European Intermodal Programs: Planning, Policy, 

and Technology (1994) 

International Technology

Scan Reports
vi INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SCAN REPORTS

Operations 

Freight Mobility and Intermodal Connectivity in China

(2008)

Commercial Motor Vehicle Size and Weight Enforcement in 

Europe (2007)

Active Travel Management: The Next Step in Congestion 

Management (2007)

Effective Use of Weigh-in-Motion Data: The Netherlands 

Case Study (2007)

Managing Travel Demand: Applying European Perspectives to 

U.S. Practice (2006)

Traffic Incident Response Practices in Europe (2006)

Underground Transportation Systems in Europe: 

Safety, Operations, and Emergency Response (2006)

Superior Materials, Advanced Test Methods, and Specifications 

in Europe (2004) 

Freight Transportation: The Latin American Market (2003) 

Meeting 21st Century Challenges of System Performance 

Through Better Operations (2003) 

Traveler Information Systems in Europe (2003) 

Freight Transportation: The European Market (2002) 

European Road Lighting Technologies (2001) 

Methods and Procedures to Reduce Motorist Delays in European 

Work Zones (2000) 

Innovative Traffic Control Technology and Practice in Europe

(1999) 

European Winter Service Technology (1998) 

Traffic Management and Traveler Information Systems (1997) 

European Traffic Monitoring (1997) 

Highway/Commercial Vehicle Interaction (1996) 

Winter Maintenance Technology and Practices—Learning from 

Abroad (1995) 

Advanced Transportation Technology (1994) 

Snowbreak Forest Book—Highway Snowstorm Countermeasure 

Manual (1990) 

Infrastructure—General 

Public-Private Partnerships for Highway Infrastructure: 

Capitalizing on International Experience (2009)

Audit Stewardship and Oversight of Large and Innovatively 

Funded Projects in Europe (2006)

Construction Management Practices in Canada and Europe

(2005) 

European Practices in Transportation Workforce Development

(2003) 

Contract Administration: Technology and Practice in Europe

(2002) 

European Road Lighting Technologies (2001) 

Geometric Design Practices for European Roads (2001) 

Geotechnical Engineering Practices in Canada and Europe

(1999) 

Geotechnology—Soil Nailing (1993) 

Infrastructure—Pavements

Warm-Mix Asphalt: European Practice (2008)

Long-Life Concrete Pavements in Europe and Canada (2007)

Quiet Pavement Systems in Europe (2005)

Superior Materials, Advanced Test Methods, and Specifications 

in Europe (2004)

Asphalt Pavement Warranties: Technology and Practice in 

Europe (2004)

Pavement Preservation Technology in France, South Africa, 

and Australia (2003) 

Recycled Materials in European Highway Environments

(1999) 

South African Pavement and Other Highway Technologies 

and Practices (1997) 

Highway/Commercial Vehicle Interaction (1996) 

European Concrete Highways (1992) 

European Asphalt Technology (1990) 

Infrastructure—Bridges 

Assuring Bridge Safety and Serviceability in Europe (2010)

Bridge Evaluation Quality Assurance in Europe (2008)

Prefabricated Bridge Elements and Systems in Japan 

and Europe (2005) 

Underground Transportation Systems in Europe (2005)

Bridge Preservation and Maintenance in Europe and 

South Africa (2005) 

Innovative Technology for Accelerated Construction of Bridge 

and Embankment Foundations in Europe (2003)

Performance of Concrete Segmental and Cable-Stayed Bridges 

in Europe (2001) 

Steel Bridge Fabrication Technologies in Europe and Japan

(2001) 

European Practices for Bridge Scour and Stream Instability 

Countermeasures (1999) 

Advanced Composites in Bridges in Europe and Japan (1997) 

Asian Bridge Structures (1997) 

Bridge Maintenance Coatings (1997) 

Northumberland Strait Crossing Project (1996) 

European Bridge Structures (1995) 

All publications are available on the Internet

at www.international.fhwa.dot.gov.
Executive Summary ........................... 1

Key Scan Findings ........................... 1

Key Lessons Learned ......................... 7

Chapter 1: Introduction ........................ 9

Scan Team................................. 9

Agencies Visited ........................... 10

Definitions ............................... 11

Chapter 2: Linking Transportation Programs With 

 Government Goals......................... 13

Transportation Performance is Linked to Government 

Goals ................................... 13

Broad Goals, Negotiated Targets, Ongoing 

Collaboration ............................. 20

Chapter 3: Linking Budgets and Accomplishments... 29

Performance-Driven Funding Allocations: 

A Difficult Goal ........................... 29

Ambitious Goals and Visions Drive Investment ..... 32

Demonstrating Return on Investment: 

Value for Money ........................... 35

Chapter 4: Transparency, Accountability, and 

 Emerging Issues ........................... 39

Incentive-Based Management .................. 40

Cooperative Goal, Target Setting ............... 44

Chapter 5: Reorganization and Refocus ........... 49

From Building Highways to Moving People........ 49

Cross-Cutting Coordination .................. 53

Safety Focus is Emphatic ..................... 53

Innovation in Reliability...................... 56

Chapter 6: Key Lessons Learned................. 61

Strategies for Implementation .................. 61

Potential U.S. Tactics for Implementation ......... 63

Chapter 7: Implementation Plan ................ 65

Outreach Efforts ........................... 65

Research Efforts............................ 67

Appendix A: Amplifying Questions .............. 71

Appendix B: Scan Team ....................... 75

Appendix C: Host Country Contacts ............. 81

Figures

Figure 1. The Victorian planning and accountability 

cycle. ..................................... 15

Figure 2. New Zealand’s performance management 

steps. ..................................... 17

Figure 3. Great Britain’s performance management approach 

spurred increased efforts to manage congestion. ....... 19

Figure 4. The Queensland transportation agencies have a 

well-articulated performance management system. ..... 20

Figure 5. The British rely on service agreements to 

implement government goals. .................... 22

Figure 6. The Swedish system translates broad 

government goals into agency action plans............ 23

Figure 7. New South Wales translates government 

strategy into measureable outputs. ................. 24

Figure 8. Victoria’s performance pyramid illustrates 

linkages between broad government goals and agency 

services..................................... 27

Figure 9. Swedish maintenance expenditures are below 

those for new investment. ....................... 30

Figure 10. The Victoria Road Management Act requires 

a systematic and methodical asset management 

approach. .................................. 30

Figure 11. Queensland captures the long-term cost of 

deferred maintenance. ......................... 31

LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY vii

Contents
viii CONTENTS

Figure 12. A project’s congestion benefits are compared 

to a no-build scenario. ......................... 36

Figure 13. Queensland officials track the overall risk to 

their bridge inventory as an ongoing metric in their 

reporting processes. ........................... 38

Figure 14. Highway fatalities in Victoria have fallen 

significantly. ................................ 39

Figure 15. Tracking trajectory against target is a British 

strategy to achieve performance. .................. 42

Figure 16. British officials are implementing strategies 

to meet their carbon targets. ..................... 51

Figure 17. All of the agencies examined had fatality rates 

significantly below the U.S. average. ................ 53

Figure 18. Victoria tracks its fatalities throughout the year 

against its yearly target for continuing reductions. ...... 55

Figure 19. Traffic on Great Britain’s M25 illustrates the 

congestion challenges facing the nation. ............. 56

Figure 20. The use of shoulders during peak periods has 

become a common British congestion strategy. ........ 57

Figure 21. Great Britain’s reliability indices allow the 

nation’s transportation officials to track delay and how 

it is affected by events such as weather. .............. 58

Tables

Table 1. New South Wales strategic framework. ....... 14

Table 2. Victoria priorities and strategies............. 26

Table 3. Swedish emission reduction trends........... 53
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY ix

AASHTO American Association of State Highway and 

 Transportation Officials

AMPO Association of Metropolitan Planning 

 Organizations

APTA American Public Transit Association 

AUD Australian dollar

CEO chief executive officer

CPM comprehensive performance management

COAG Council of Australian Governments

EU European Union

FHWA Federal Highway Administration

GAO U.S. Government Accountability Office

GASB Government Accounting Standards Board

GBP British pound

GPS Global Positioning System

HA Highways Agency

LAA Local Area Agreements 

LTCCP Long-Term Council Community Plan

MPO metropolitan planning organization

NACE National Association of County Engineers

NCHRP National Cooperative Highway Research 

 Program

NPI National Performance Indicators

NLTP National Land Transport Programme

NZTA New Zealand Transport Agency

PMDU Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit

RAMS Road Asset Management System

RLTS Regional Land Transport Strategy

RSP Results and Services Plan

RTA New South Wales Roads and Traffic 

 Authority

SEK Swedish krona

SRA Swedish Road Administration

SCATS Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic 

 System

TIP Transportation Improvement Program

U.K. United Kingdom

USD U.S. dollar

U.S. DOT U.S. Department of Transportation 

Abbreviations and Acronyms
x
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 1

At a time when the United States is working to 

define a Federal-State-regional-local framework 

for transportation performance management, 

the international examples examined in this scan 

hold many lessons. The performance management systems of 

the studied agencies demonstrated clear linkage between 

government expenditures and transportation agency results. 

Long-term government goals were incorporated into transportation agency actions—and the results of those actions 

could be clearly documented to show what the public received 

for its transportation investment. 

The officials visited offered the scan team invaluable advice 

from their past decade—in some cases more—of performance 

management. The systems they developed applied to diverse 

settings, from the complex and densely populated Great 

Britain to the rural and isolated New Zealand islands. Despite 

the diversity of their applications, the performance management systems had five universal components, or steps. From 

Sweden to New Zealand, the officials interviewed recommended similar processes: 

1. Articulate a limited number of high-level national 

transportation policy goals that are linked to a clear

set of measures and targets. 

2. Negotiate intergovernmental agreements on how state, 

regional, and local agencies will achieve the national goals 

while translating them into local context and priorities. 

3. Evaluate performance by tracking the measures and 

reporting them in clear language appropriate for the 

audience.

4. Collaborate with state, regional, and local agencies to 

achieve the targets by emphasizing incentives, training, 

and support—instead of penalties—as the preferred way 

to advance performance.

5. Perpetuate long-term improvement by understanding 

that the real value of performance management is 

an improved decisionmaking and investment process, 

not the achievement of many arbitrary, short-term 

targets.

Key Scan Findings 

The federal-state relationships found abroad were more akin 

to coach-player relationships than to umpire-player relationships. It was common to find different levels of government 

jointly setting a target, then collaborating on ways to achieve 

it. It was not common to find one level of government setting 

a target, then penalizing another for missing it. 

The scan team found that the true value of performance 

management was in achieving steady long-term progress. 

Many officials stressed that another important benefit of their 

performance management systems was the transparency they 

created. The transparency improved understanding about 

transportation issues and led to greater degrees of trust. 

Striving for long-term accomplishment created collaboration 

among levels of government, not contention.

Broad Policy Goals and Collaboration

Despite the greater linkage of national goals to agency 

activities found in the visited countries, the central governments set few explicit and quantitative national transportation 

targets for the transportation agencies. The two exceptions 

found were in the areas of safety and climate change in the 

two European countries. The central government articulated 

broad policy goals, and the transportation agency translated 

those goals into specific performance measures or targets in 

collaboration with the federal or state government. This 

collaborative target-setting practice appeared to exist between 

both national and state governments and state and regional/

local governments.

The scan team seldom found that one level of government 

mandated the performance of another. Rather, service-level 

agreements or other negotiated documents between the 

central government and the transportation agency were used 

to define performance measures and targets for which the 

transportation agency was held accountable. The service-level 

agreements communicated priorities and clarified outcomes 

Executive Summary
2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

while allowing each state or region to negotiate measures 

and priorities important to its unique circumstances. These 

negotiations were supported by extensive data collection that 

showed trends in systemwide performance. Negotiations 

between the agencies and their central governments were 

fluid and continuous. Flexibility was particularly evident 

with major cities, where unique transportation needs and 

solutions were recognized.

The combination of national goals cascading into state or 

regional performance measures appeared to create a strong 

focus on outcomes instead of process. Not evident abroad 

were the highly detailed and procedural, fiscally constrained, 

long-range plans and short-term Transportation Improvement 

Programs (TIPs) found in the United States. Instead, the 

negotiated service agreements served to clarify desired 

outcomes over the next 1- to 5-year period. 

Performance-Driven Funding Allocations: 

A Difficult Goal

The agencies the scan team visited clearly documented system 

and organizational performance, often in detailed trends over 

a number of years. The richness of reporting was usually quite 

sophisticated. The agencies demonstrated improved customer 

satisfaction, higher reliability in transit and highway travel 

times, reduced environmental impacts, and greater efficiencies. Their performance management systems naturally 

dovetailed with asset management systems. The agencies 

demonstrated a keen knowledge of system conditions 

and trends and a finely calibrated understanding of system 

investment needs, often by asset type and region. Clearly, 

the agencies benefited from managing their performance 

to maximize resources, optimize assets, and earn credibility 

from legislators and budgeting agencies.

Despite those benefits to both legislatures and agencies, 

budget appropriations were for the most part not driven 

by the resources required to achieve the performance targets. 

In short, performance management appeared to be less of 

an influence on budgeting than other factors. Performance 

management demonstrated how funds were spent and to 

what end, but the systems did not appear to include a feedback loop that triggered legislative appropriation decisions. 

The team saw little evidence that legislatures or executive 

branch financial agencies establish asset investment levels 

based on data from performance management systems. 

One British official noted there was no easy linkage 

between transportation program goals and the budget 

set by legislators or Treasury officials.

Performance results, however, were considered important in 

budget discussions. The performance results demonstrated 

how effectively the agency spent its budget, but the 

performance targets did not strongly influence the budget 

level. Discussions indicated that this was because of overall 

funding constraints in competing public sectors, such as 

education and health care. It was not because of an ineffective performance management program or agency performance. Most agencies did not have a dedicated road user 

fund; agencies competed for funding with all other 

government programs. One agency stated that while its 

performance management did not garner a budget increase, 

elected officials viewed it as so effective that it was able to 

sustain its budget when others were cut. 

In three of the six cases, agencies reported discouragement 

that they could not convince legislators to invest more in 

system preservation despite their sophisticated documentation. Further discussion noted that identifying large maintenance funding gaps was a longstanding concern. Similar to 

the United States, the countries had difficulty expressing the 

impact of changes in pavement and bridge condition at the 

political level.

Queensland developed a sophisticated means of demonstrating long-term financial risk by calculating the unfunded 

liabilities caused by underinvestment in maintenance. 

It uses asset inventories, management systems, and overall 

asset management approaches to convert asset maintenance 

needs into a balance-sheet calculation. The process was 

similar to the Government Accounting Standards Board 

34 (GASB 34) process required in the United States. 

Sweden, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand used 

variations of this approach to summarize all asset management financial needs in one comprehensive calculation 

that documented the future infrastructure liability the 

government faces.

Central government decisions on agency operating budgets 

tend to remain incremental. System preservation increases 

were modest and based on increases from past budgets. 

Budget increases depended on whether the government had 

any residual revenue left once other priorities were met.

Ambitious Goals and Visions Drive

Investment 

The host countries provided examples of recent budget 

increases to expand the transportation system or carry 

out new economic stimulus programs: 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 3

`Ambitious new national visions and broad goals, as 

opposed to a need to meet specific performance targets, 

tended to generate new investments in transportation. 

`When the governments articulated a new transportation 

vision, adopted new transportation goals, or sought to 

use transportation investment to achieve other ends 

(e.g., economic stimulus), the likelihood of new investment increased. The Australian Nation Building Program 

was planned as a record AUD26.7 billion road and rail 

construction program over 6 years, with an AUD2.3 

billion program in 2009. 

`Sweden has been undertaking significant investments 

for nationally important corridors and bridges. A cordon 

pricing system will be used to pay for a new outer belt 

for Stockholm.

`In 2009, the New Zealand government announced a 

major investment in seven of its most important routes, 

called the Roads of National Significance. These routes are 

critical to ensure users have access to significant markets, 

areas of employment, and economic growth. The system 

is similar to the U.S. National Highway System.

`Great Britain has been using tolling and long-term 

design-build-finance-and-operate contracts for a USD10.2 

billion upgrade and long-term maintenance of the M25 

highway.

Demonstrating Return on Investment: 

Value for Money

“Value for money” was a common theme observed during 

the scan. The agencies frequently used benefit-cost analysis 

to evaluate projects and programs and demonstrate the 

effectiveness of their investments.

`In several of the agencies visited, every project received a 

benefit-cost analysis. The benefit-cost ratio was a common 

measure for discussing project selection in the agency and 

with the public, other ministries, and legislatures. 

`The use of benefit-cost analysis and a value-for-money 

approach appeared to give the agencies a common 

language to demonstrate the value of their projects 

and programs.

`Many major projects were selected based on political and 

broader policy priorities, not just benefit-cost ratios. 

`One agency official cautioned that the use of a benefit-cost 

analysis may erroneously exclude an investment that may 

yield a greater unexpected benefit in the future. 

`Some agencies indicated that they evaluate impacts of 

some major projects after they are completed (e.g., beforeand-after analysis) to assess whether benefits included in 

the original benefit-cost analysis were actually realized. 

This type of post-construction evaluation is not done 

routinely in the United States.

`Another way to demonstrate value for money was by 

using risk management. Several agencies appeared to 

make tradeoffs based on formal risk management. Risk 

was used to differentiate between types of bridge investments, set appropriate speed limits, and support safety 

improvements. 

Accountability is Transparent 

The agencies visited clearly embraced performance management as the system for delivering results and documenting 

accountability.

`The agencies produced detailed, ongoing measures 

illustrating their achievement of agency goals and 

management of public resources. 

`It was common for the agencies to regularly review 

performance with agency managers and to produce 

monthly, quarterly, and annual performance summaries. 

`Continual two-way dialogue occurred at the ministerial 

and executive levels, as well as with the parliamentary 

committees in most of the agencies visited.

`Polished, high-level annual reports detailing goals, 

outcomes, and expenditures were common, and at least 

one was also used also for recruiting purposes.

`Dashboards and extensive reporting, mostly internal and 

between governments, clearly expressed what the agencies 

achieved, at what cost, and for whom. 

`Regular reporting was viewed as a key mechanism for 

achieving accountability.

`In general, performance measures were used to support 

budget requests and demonstrate the agencies’ use of 

resources.

Limited Number of High-Level Measures 

The scan team found that in general, national governments 

have steadily reduced the number of measures and targets 

required of transportation agencies and moved toward 

fewer, broader, more policy-oriented goals. 

`The most dramatic example was in Great Britain. 

Since 1998, the number of central government-imposed 

measures across all government departments has shrunk 

from 600 to 30. These 30 Public Service Agreements 

reflect the high-level outcomes the government is 

committed to secure.

`Likewise in 1998, local governments in England were 

required to report more than 2,000 performance measures 
4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

covering all aspects of local governance, including 

transportation. That large number was rescinded in the 

face of broad criticism and replaced with 198 measures, 

with a greater focus on higher level outcomes to achieve. 

Of those 198 measures, local governments must set up to 

35 targets, which they negotiate with the central government based on local priorities. In addition, 18 mandatory 

targets must be reached for education and children. The 

remaining measures are reported as long-term indicators 

for trend line analysis.

`The agreed-on local performance targets are articulated 

through Local Area Agreements. The targets sometimes 

differ in form from those applied to the Highways Agency, 

but in principle the local government contribution, 

together with delivery by central government agencies, 

is designed to secure delivery of the 30 overall Public 

Service Agreements. 

“Do It With People, Not To Them”

“Do it with people, not to them” was both a direct quote 

and a common sentiment heard from transportation officials 

during the scan. From Sweden to New Zealand, transportation officials advised that carrots versus sticks, incentives 

versus penalties, and dialogue versus dictates were preferred 

in the intergovernmental management of performance. 

`In most of the agencies examined, officials at one level 

of government required performance reporting of 

lower levels of government. 

`Universally, state and national officials said they did not 

impose penalties on local or state agencies that failed to 

meet performance targets. In fact, few actual targets had 

to be achieved. 

`Goals and measures were used to track performance 

and identify areas for improvement. When improvement 

was needed, it was achieved through training, benchmarking, peer exchanges, and local agency staff 

development. 

Typical was the Swedish example, in which the central 

government expressed several broad goals for the 

transportation department. From those, the Swedish Road 

Administration negotiated a comprehensive set of about 

300 performance measures it developed for both internal 

and external reporting. Hard targets for those measures were 

negotiated between the agency and the ministry. For instance, 

its target to reduce traffic fatalities by another 20 in 2009 

was a short-term milestone toward a national vision of zero 

fatalities. It also targeted a department reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 70,000 tons in 2009 as a short-term 

milestone toward reducing national carbon emissions. Both 

targets were negotiated with the central government. If the 

agency fails to achieve the targets, the performance is noted 

and a determination is made on what different tactics are 

needed to achieve the goal.

In short, the measures are benchmarks for continuous 

improvement and dialogue, rather than milestones for 

penalties.

Outcomes Relate to the Public in 

Personal Terms

The transportation agencies tended to speak to the 

public in broad, outcome-based terms, such as “the journey 

home” or “support for the journey,” instead of technical 

terms. 

`Transportation was translated into the topics important 

to people, instead of technical engineering, financial, 

or operational terms. 

`The agencies produced voluminous technical support 

data, but they were often summarized in general categories 

important to stakeholders.

`Concern about moving people rather than vehicles was 

a significant manifestation of this focus on person-centric 

outcomes. The agencies appeared to focus on reducing 

personal travel time and vehicle delay and offering more 

choice in transportation modes.

`The personal focus appeared to increase the emphasis 

on bicycling, walking, and other forms of active travel.

`The Swedish Road Administration spoke of its mission 

as evolving from being highway builders to community 

builders. 

In many cases, the data are packaged for a lay reader. Rather 

than extensive technical and financial data, public reporting 

focused more on outcomes of more immediate relevance 

and clarity to the typical user. 

Performance Management Takes Time 

and Resources 

Many officials noted that successful performance management systems are long-term, iterative processes that require 

a commitment of funding and staff resources. All of the 

agencies had dedicated staff to collect and report performance data. All reported that measures evolve and often 

take significant effort to develop. The British spent 4 years 

refining their reliability measure and already are exploring 

a next generation of measure that is more understandable 

to the public.
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 5

Outcomes Are Difficult to Measure

Important outcomes that are difficult to measure in the 

United States were equally elusive in the agencies studied. 

Such measures as transportation’s effect on the economy, 

travel time reliability, and transportation’s effect on the 

environment were not easily captured by the visited agencies. 

All of the agencies expressed a desire for continued evaluation 

of ways to measure transportation’s effects in these areas, 

particularly the economy.

Short-Term Results Can Be 

Overemphasized

All of the agencies officials support performance management, but they also spoke of a tendency of elected officials to 

emphasize short-term accomplishments in lieu of long-term 

goals. Several agency officials cautioned that while frequent 

budget reporting of results achieved short-term transparency, they feared that emphasis on “bean counting” skewed 

performance toward easily measured, short-term accomplishments. They advised that a better system was one that 

tracked accomplishment of long-term goals, which may be 

more ambiguous to measure but more important overall. 

Important issues such as the public’s satisfaction with the 

journey, transportation’s support of economic development, 

and transportation’s link to environmental sustainability 

may be vitally important but difficult to measure in 

monthly increments. 

Candid, Confidential Reporting Has 

Its Place

Several agencies cited examples in which their performance 

reporting was used to criticize the agency, either in the 

media or in political debates. Several acknowledged that 

such criticism creates a desire to set easily achievable targets, 

hide or downplay problems, or play “metric games,” which 

undermine the transparency and accountability of performance management.

While they had public reporting processes, all of the 

agencies had some form of candid, confidential reporting 

of results to central ministries. Great Britain used the Prime 

Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) delivery assessment, 

an uncompromising, truthful assessment conducted every 

6 months as a confidential tool. It was conducted as an 

evidenced self-assessment and action-setting exercise by 

government departments that was challenged and moderated by the PMDU. It drove the agency’s actions for the next 

6 months. These confidential reporting processes allowed for 

candid discussions with central governments about agency 

performance, steps that may be needed to improve 

performance, and best practices. 

Reorganization and Refocus: From Building 

Highways to Moving People

The six agencies visited were in a state of transition—in terms 

of both their organization and their basic mission. 

Three were in the process of reorganizing to merge the 

highway with state or regional transit agencies. The merger 

was driven by a national government desire to move away 

from a traditional highway-centric focus to a broader, more 

inclusive approach to surface transportation planning in 

highly congested urban areas. 

“We are moving people, we are serving business, and we 

are moving freight. We are no longer in the business of just 

moving cars,” said a New South Wales official. “We are no 

longer in the business of counting cars. It is about allocating 

road space.”

“We are a travel agency. That is what we are involved with. 

It is not just the road,” said a Swedish Road Administration 

official. “We are community builders.”

“(We) had to do a cultural realignment to recognize that 

we are part of the solution for public transport,” said a 

New South Wales highway official.

“The most important message was that we are the road 

authority, but we manage the transport network as one 

network that includes roads, buses, and trains. More and 

more, we are doing integration,” said a VicRoads official in 

Melbourne. “From a road authority perspective, we can’t build 

enough roads. If we did, it would not be a city anyone wants 

to live in. We need to manage the demand in travel.”

The cause and effect of the agencies’ performance management systems and their shift to holistic transportation 

agencies were not entirely clear. It appeared that the agencies’ 

forecast of continuing degradation in travel time reliability 

pushed them beyond strategies of only expanding highways. 

The examined agencies placed a great emphasis on transit 

service, rail passenger service, land use integration, and 

moving people and freight as well as vehicles. 

Highway Corridors Remain Important

While the agencies displayed a strong commitment to transit, 

passenger rail, and urban land use integration, they also had 

ambitious highway corridor programs. All of the agencies 
6 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

retained a strong commitment to rural connectivity that relied 

heavily on highways. The Swedish and New Zealand governments emphasized their environmental commitments, but they 

also had programs to improve national highway corridors. The 

Australian states all maintained rural connectivity as a basic 

goal of their transportation programs. Although the urban 

systems emphasized ambitious transit and rail programs, the 

agencies also retained a strong highway component, particularly 

as it relates to national corridors and rural access.

Sustainability With Mobility

The agencies visited displayed a strong commitment to 

addressing climate change and sustainability. However, none 

had adopted, nor had imposed on them, requirements to 

reduce vehicle-miles of travel.

`Their transportation-related climate change strategies 

relied on other tactics, such as improving vehicular fuel 

efficiency, reducing the use of electricity in lighting and 

buildings, and encouraging nonautomobile passenger 

travel.

`The agencies were developing refined methods for 

calculating their greenhouse gas emissions.

`All of the agencies acknowledged that they lack the 

strategies to achieve the ambitious long-term carbonreduction goals their nations have established.

`As governments adopted goals related to new environmental issues, agencies were exploring how to reflect these 

emerging priorities in their programs and in the measures 

and targets in their performance management systems.

`Transportation agencies appeared to work more frequently 

with other cabinet agencies on cross-cutting issues, such as 

economic development, public health, and climate change. 

In part, this appeared to be the result of multiple agencies 

sharing responsibility for cross-cutting policy goals, such 

as climate change or economic development.

Safety Focus is Emphatic

The agencies were particularly emphatic about documenting 

safety results.

`The agencies achieved significant safety reductions by 

applying performance management tactics to reduce 

the number of crashes. 

`In addition to targeting black spot, or high-crash, 

locations, they applied programmatic treatments, such 

as extensive cable barriers and skid-resistant pavements. 

`They also relied heavily on increased police surveillance, 

using automated speed enforcement and random alcohol 

breath tests to reduce speed and crashes. 

`The New Zealand Transport Agency conducted a periodic 

baseline review of the benefits of enforcement services that 

could lead to increased investment. An additional 337,000 

road-policing hours were added when the benefit-cost 

analysis showed an 8:1 return (with no diminishing 

returns). Benefit-cost analysis of targeted onroad enforcement, speed cameras, and safety advertising has shown 

benefits of up to 28:1. 

`The New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority and the 

New Zealand Transport Agency broke their high-crash, or 

black spot, areas, into great detail. In the process, they 

learned that roadway departure crashes were most common 

on curves where the radius was sufficiently tight to cause 

handling maneuvering difficulty, but not tight enough to 

cause drivers to slow down appreciably. By honing in on 

curves with these specific problem radii, they targeted 

limited safety funds and effectively reduced roadway 

departure crashes in New South Wales and New Zealand. 

Measures Drive Operations Innovation 

Several agencies displayed a progressive attitude toward 

highway operations, spurred by their efforts to meet reliability 

goals. The British, in particular, had invested considerable 

effort in measuring reliability on high-volume national routes. 

All of the agencies reported that their reliability measures 

were still evolving and they were not entirely satisfied with 

their measurement tools. However, it was clear that the more 

urbanized agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and 

Sweden were investing considerable effort in measuring 

real-time highway, transit, and rail operations to improve 

travel time reliability, enhance transportation choices, and 

reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

`In Great Britain, Department for Transport officials said 

they changed their entire approach to relieving congestion 

on major national routes when tight revenues and increasing public resistance to land takings for roads prevented 

the widening of highways. However, the nation’s performance goals required improvement in travel reliability. 

The department had been downsizing for three decades, 

but reversed that policy by hiring 1,500 additional traffic 

officers as a strategy to prevent crashes and clear them 

quickly to improve highway operations. The department 

fundamentally shifted to operations-based strategies that 

significantly increased the number of traffic cameras, 

speed-monitored automated enforcement, incident 

response efforts, and use of hard-shoulder running. 

Regions were allocated funds specifically for intelligent 

transportation systems deployment and operation, in addition to preservation and maintenance funds. After years of 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 7

steady decreases, they documented small increases in travel 

time reliability, although this is partly a result of a drop in 

traffic growth caused by the economic recession.

`In Melbourne, Australia, the Victorian Department of 

Transport fundamentally altered its approach to integrating 

land use and transportation when its forecasts showed it 

could not meet its long-term reliability goals in the face of 

rising population growth. It identified five regional central 

business districts in which land use development will be 

encouraged to capitalize on excess transportation capacity.

`In Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, the states integrated 

management of local traffic signals and provided signal 

priority for bus fleets, which have Global Positioning 

System and geographic information system real-time 

monitoring. In addition, transport officials targeted 

efforts to increase low-cost walking and cycling in highly 

congested urban corridors. 

A consistent finding throughout the study was that although 

hard-and-fast performance targets were waning, the steady, 

long-term practice of benchmarking to broad government 

goals tended to spur innovative solutions to major transportation challenges, such as improving operations and travel time 

reliability.

Key Lessons Learned

The scan provided considerable insight into the evolution 

of performance management among nations that have 

practiced it for at least a decade. Their systems have matured 

and evolved in ways that provide lessons for the United States. 

The scan also validated the use of performance management 

as an effective means to translate broad government goals into 

meaningful agency practice. The performance management 

systems observed abroad provided transparency and accountability to transportation programs, while also allowing 

flexibility to meet local needs. 

The officials offered the scan team advice in several key areas 

of performance management. The following outlines their 

advice and the scan team’s conclusions: 

1. Articulate a limited number of high-level national 

transportation policy goals that are linked to a clear set 

of measures and targets. 

2. Negotiate intergovernmental agreements on how state, 

regional, and local agencies will achieve the national 

goals while translating them into state, regional, or local 

context and priorities. 

3. Evaluate performance by tracking the measures and 

reporting them in clear language appropriate for the 

audience.

4. Collaborate with state, regional, and local agencies to 

achieve the targets by emphasizing incentives, training, 

and support—instead of penalties—as the preferred way 

to advance performance.

5. Perpetuate long-term improvement by understanding 

that the real value of performance management is an 

improved decisionmaking and investment process, not 

the achievement of many arbitrary, short-term targets.

6. Improve the use of benefit-cost analysis and risk 

management practices to demonstrate value for money. 

Consider major project postconstruction evaluations 

to assess whether benefits included in the original 

benefit-cost assessments were realized. 

7. Recognize that major national visions, not achievement 

of narrow targets, tend to generate new investment.

8. Convert long-term deferred maintenance needs into a 

long-term future liability calculation. This would clearly 

link the budget to long-term system sustainability.

9. Demonstrate accountability by producing annual 

performance reports on agency achievements.

10. Instead of using technical jargon, report results with 

language meaningful to the public, such as “the journey 

home” or “support for the journey.” Detailed technical 

terms should be used for internal reporting, but should 

be translated into understandable language for the 

public. 

11. Collaborate frequently with other cabinet agencies, 

including conducting periodic meetings with top 

leadership on cross-cutting issues such as economic 

development, public health, highway safety, and 

climate change.

12. Have a strong safety focus and document the results 

of safety measures, in addition to the usual measures 

of infrastructure condition, internal operations, transit, 

and rail ontime performance. 

13. Focus on desired outcomes for travel time reliability that 

lead to expanded strategies for highway operations. 

14. Learn from international examples of addressing climate 

change that rely on improving vehicles, fuels, and modal 

choice, but do not mandate reductions in travel or 

mobility.

15. Provide resources to enable high-quality data tracking, 

analysis, and reporting capabilities that allow for the use 

of performance data in decisionmaking.

16. Recognize that performance management is not a black 

box or simplistic solution. It is a culture to grow in the 

agency as an important consideration in the decisionmaking and investment process.
8 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 9

For 2 weeks in July and August 2009, a scan team from 

the United States visited international transportation 

agencies with mature performance management 

systems to study how these organizations demonstrate accountability to elected officials and the public. In 

addition, the team examined how these transportation agencies 

use goal setting and performance measures to manage, explain, 

deliver, and adjust their transportation budgets and internal 

activities. The following were the specific elements the scan 

sought to examine:

`Examples in which national, state, or provincial strategic 

goals are translated into meaningful performance 

measures for the transportation agency

`Ways to establish effective and achievable performance 

levels based on input from the public, elected officials, 

and the business community

`Examples of tying performance and transparency 

to national, state, regional, and metropolitan plans 

and budgets

`Ways transportation agencies can demonstrate good 

governance and accountability in meeting or exceeding 

performance expectations

`Advice on what works and what does not when performance measures are applied to federal or multiregion 

transportation programs

The scan team visited the following agencies:

`Swedish Road Administration (SRA) in Stockholm, Sweden

`United Kingdom (U.K.) Department for Transport and 

Highways Agency (HA) in London, England

`New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) and 

Austroads in Sydney, Australia

`Victoria Department of Transport and VicRoads in 

Melbourne, Australia

`Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads in 

Brisbane, Australia

`New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) in Wellington, 

New Zealand

Scan Team

The scan team was cochaired by Carlos Braceras, deputy 

director of the Utah Department of Transportation (DOT), 

and Robert Tally, Indiana Division administrator for the 

Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). They were 

accompanied by a diverse and multidisciplinary scan team: 

`Daniela Bremmer, director of strategic assessment, 

Washington State DOT 

`Leon E. Hank, chief administrative officer, Michigan 

DOT 

`Jane Hayse, chief, Transportation Planning Division, 

Atlanta Regional Commission 

`Dr. Anthony (Tony) R. Kane, director of engineering 

and technical services, American Association of State 

Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO)

`Dr. Kristine L. Leiphart, deputy associate administrator 

for budget and policy, Federal Transit Administration 

`James (Jim) March, team leader, Office of Policy and 

Governmental Affairs, FHWA 

`Steven M. Pickrell, senior vice president, Cambridge 

Systematics, Inc. 

`Dr. J. Woody Stanley, team leader, Strategic Initiatives 

Team, Office of Policy and Governmental Affairs, FHWA

`Jenne van der Velde, strategic advisor, Dutch Ministry of 

Transport, Public Works, and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat)

`Connie P. Yew, team leader, Stewardship/Oversight 

Team, Office of Infrastructure, FHWA

`Gordon Proctor, Gordon Proctor & Associates, Inc., 

report facilitator

The scanning study was conducted against a backdrop of three 

major U.S. transportation needs: 

`Reauthorizing Federal legislation for transportation 

programs 

`Stabilizing the financially drained Highway Trust Fund 

that supports highway and transit programs

Chapter 1

Introduction 
10 INTRODUCTION

`Ensuring greater accountability from State, regional, and 

local recipients of Federal transportation aid

Those issues made the scan particularly timely and important.

Agencies Visited

The countries and transportation agencies were chosen 

because they have mature performance management systems 

that they use to manage large, complex, industrialized transportation networks. All were parliamentary democracies, 

which may influence the degree to which their governments 

can rapidly change policy for the central transportation 

agencies. Otherwise, the agencies visited had many similarities 

to U.S. transportation agencies. One strong similarity was that 

many of the agencies not only needed to carry out direct goals 

set by the central government, but they also needed to cascade 

those goals to many local agencies. As in the United States, 

many transportation services were provided by local 

government or private contractors. 

The scan team visited the following agencies:

Swedish Road Administration—SRA is the highway 

agency for the Swedish national government. Sweden has 

the world’s 15th-largest highway network. Of that, SRA is 

responsible for 98,400 kilometers (km) (61,000 miles (m)) 

of state roads. Municipalities manage 41,000 km (25,500 

mi) of local routes and streets. Private persons and companies manage about 290,000 km (180,000 mi) of private 

roads, mainly logging routes, of which 76,100 km (47,000 

mi) get state grants and are open to general traffic. The 

highway network spans a nation the size of California, but 

Sweden has only 9 million people compared to California’s 

36 million. Sweden stretches from the Baltic Sea to the 

south to well above the Arctic Circle to the north. In 

addition to managing highways, SRA interacts frequently 

with bus and rail passenger services offered in major cities 

such as Stockholm.

British Department for Transport and Highways 

Agency—The main British transportation agency is 

the Department for Transport, which oversees HA and 

monitors the private contractors that operate the nation’s 

rail passenger system. The agency improves, operates, and 

maintains strategic roads for 51 million people in England, 

who live in a 50,000-square-mi (129,499-square-km) 

country about the size of Alabama. The Department for 

Transport manages policy and funding for a transportation 

system that includes 80,000 buses, 17 train operators, and 

about 4,500 mi (7,242 km) of the nation’s 245,000 mi 

(394,289 km) of roads. 

New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority—

The Australian state of New South Wales has a sprawling 

landscape 15 percent larger geographically than Texas. Its 

major city is Sydney, with its iconic bridge and opera house 

and a rapidly growing population. The Australian state has a 

population of 7 million, of which 4.4 million live in Sydney. 

RTA manages 17,932 km (11,142 mi) of roads and provides 

financial assistance to local councils to manage 18,257 km 

(11,344 mi) of regional roads. The agency also manages 

another 2,946 km (1,818 mi) of regional and local roads in 

unincorporated areas of New South Wales with no local 

councils.

Victoria Department of Transport and VicRoads—Victoria 

is Australia’s smallest state geographically, but it is the most 

densely populated with 5.2 million people. Despite its size in 

relation to other Australian states, it is nearly as large as 

Montana and includes the city of Melbourne with 3.4 million 

people. VicRoads manages 22,250 km (13,734 mi) of public 

roads, or about 14 percent of the state’s total, but those routes 

carry 82 percent of the state’s highway travel. The Department 

of Transport is a policy and funding agency that not only 

manages VicRoads, but also sets policy, planning, and funding 

direction for the privately provided transit and rail services.

Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads—

This newly consolidated agency combined the former 

Queensland Transport and Department of Main Roads. 

Both the former agencies and the combined new one 

display a well-articulated strategic management framework. 

Queensland is Australia’s fastest growing state, with a population of 4.2 million spread across a huge landmass twice the 

size of Texas. Queensland is a diverse state that includes the 

upscale Miami Beach-like Gold Coast, the Great Barrier Reef, 

and thousands of square miles of sparsely populated interior. 

The agency has 34,000 km (21,000 mi) of highways under its 

control out of 188,000 km (116,000 mi) in the state. It also 

coordinates, sets policy for, and funds several transit agencies. 

New Zealand Ministry of Transport and New Zealand 

Transport Agency—New Zealand is a nation of only 4.2 

million spread over two major islands that combined are the 

size of Great Britain. With its diverse terrain and relatively 

small population, New Zealand faces significant transportation challenges, both in sustaining its internal transportation 

network and shipping exports to international markets. 

NZTA, the main transportation agency, was created in 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 11

August 2008 by merging Transit New Zealand (the highway 

agency) and Land Transport New Zealand (the funding and 

planning agency). Despite its small size, the country has been 

cited frequently in international studies of best practices in 

asset management and safety. It has 93,576 km (57,762 mi) 

of roads, of which NZTA manages 10,895 km (6,725 mil).

Definitions

For the purpose of the scan, the following definitions 

were used:

Performance measurement—The U.S. Government 

Accountability Office (GAO) definition of performance 

measurement is “the ongoing monitoring and reporting 

of program accomplishments, particularly progress toward 

preestablished goals.” The GAO defines a program as “any 

activity, project, function, or policy that has an identifiable 

purpose or set of objectives.” FHWA defines a performance 

measure as “a qualitative or quantitative measure of outcomes, 

outputs, efficiency, or cost-effectiveness. In general, measures 

should be related to an organization’s mission and programs, 

and should not merely measure one-time or short-term 

activities.”

Performance management—AASHTO defines performance management as an ongoing process that translates 

strategic goals into relevant and detailed measures and targets 

that, along with resources, are continuously monitored to 

ensure achievement of published institutional goals. Comprehensive performance management (CPM) uses that definition 

in all key functions of a transport agency, including policy 

development and long-range planning; programming and 

budgeting; program, project, and service delivery; system 

operation; and monitoring and reporting of results in a 

variety of forms to a variety of audiences.
12 INTRODUCTION
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 13

A key report for the New South Wales 

RTA is called Blueprint: 2008–2012 RTA 

Corporate Plan. It links the Australian 

state’s aspirations with the day-to-day 

activities of its transportation agency. 

Such reporting, which clearly demonstrates how transportation fits into larger societal goals, was evident in the scan of 

selected transportation agencies conducted in summer 2009. 

The scan on linking transportation performance and 

accountability provided substantial insight into how 

transportation agencies can incorporate broad national or 

state goals into their transportation performance management systems. This linkage of national and state goals to 

agency performance allows the agencies to illustrate how 

transportation serves larger societal goals and document 

accountability, performance, and need. The examples appear 

to hold clear lessons as the United States considers a national 

performance management system for its transportation 

programs. In this chapter, the underlying philosophy and 

strategy of the agencies’ performance management systems 

are discussed. 

Transportation Performance is Linked 

to Government Goals

A direct linkage between what society expects from its 

transportation agencies and what they achieve was strongly 

evident in the case study agencies for four reasons.

First, the national or state government articulated clear goals 

for the transportation system. Policy goals or expectations, 

such as economic development, safety, environmental sustainability, or best value for the money, were set as broad national 

or state transportation goals.

Second, the agencies negotiated service agreements that 

translated these broad goals into clearly articulated performance measures and targets. Third, the agencies’ performance 

management systems reported their accomplishments in 

achieving the measures and targets. Fourth, the agencies 

continually refined their processes during more than a decade 

of performance management. Their officials cautioned that 

years of effort are needed to fully develop the performance 

management process. 

The performance management systems set clear performance 

expectations and created transparency, not only on how the 

agencies perform but also on how their efforts contribute to 

broad national policy goals. In the agencies visited, it was 

apparent that transportation was considered a means to 

important societal ends. It also was apparent how effectively 

the agencies achieved those ends. 

Despite the strong linkage between central government 

strategy and transportation agency execution, the scanning 

study did not find requirements that transportation agencies 

or regional planning organizations have long-term plans with 

specific projects lists, or fiscal constraint and air quality 

conformity requirements. The long-term plans the team saw 

tended to focus on policies, strategies, corridors, and general 

approaches to providing transportation, not on detailed 

long-term project plans. Plans that included specific, fiscally 

constrained lists of projects tended to be of shorter terms, 

such as 5 years. The team did not find analogies to the U.S. 

model, which requires fiscally constrained, 30-year, projectspecific plans.

New South Wales Performance Strategy

The Australian state of New South Wales has more than 7 

million people in a sprawling landscape 15 percent larger 

geographically than Texas. Its major city is Sydney, with 

its iconic bridge and opera house and a rapidly growing 

population. 

At the time of the scanning study, the New South Wales State 

Plan included 34 priorities developed after an extensive public 

involvement process that began in 2006. The State Plan had 

several priorities that directly linked to the Business Plan and 

subsequent performance management system for the state 

Chapter 2

Linking Transportation Programs

With Government Goals
14 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

highway agency, the New South Wales RTA. The strategic 

priorities for RTA were enumerated clearly in the State Plan 

and were included among other critical social objectives. 

The plan includes a goal-priority-target framework with 

the elements in table 1.

Building on the State Plan, RTA developed its own strategic 

document and framework, Blueprint: 2008–2012 RTA 

Corporate Plan. It noted, “The NSW State Plan is the key 

focus for the RTA’s activities. . . . The State Plan provides the 

vision for NSW for the next ten years.” It notes that of the 

34 priorities in the State Plan, RTA is the lead agency on the 

safer roads priority and is a partner agency for five others. 

“The Blueprint directs our organization in achieving these 

priorities,” it stated.

Further specifying the agency’s focus is the annual Results 

and Services Plan (RSP), a contract-like document negotiated between RTA and the central government ministry. 

The RSP is a confidential document that provides specifics 

on how the agency will spend its resources and direct its 

activities during the year to achieve the larger objectives 

set out in the State Plan and Blueprint. The RSP is a candid 

assessment that the central government can use to monitor 

agency progress. For public accountability, RTA produces its 

(annual report) corporate plan and budget papers, which lay 

out its short-term expenditures and expected accomplishments. The result of these documents is a comprehensive 

performance management approach to managing the 

agency. The framework started with the State Plan and 

cascaded throughout the organization down to the level 

of individual employees. New South Wales officials noted 

that within 6 months of being hired, an employee needs 

a personal performance plan that documents how he or 

she links to the agency’s strategic priorities. 

RTA officials noted that the evolution of the performance 

management framework created a direct link between 

what the public stated as its priorities and the activities 

carried out by the agency. They noted that in the original 

drafts of the state plan, transportation was not a prominent 

issue. However, during the extensive public involvement 

process, issues of congestion and infrastructure rose to 

prominence. 

Table 1. New South Wales strategic framework.

New South Wales Strategic Framework

State Focus Transportation Agency Focus

Activity Area Goal Priorities Targets

Delivering 

better service

An effective 

transport 

system

Increasing share of 

peak-hour journeys on a 

safe and reliable public 

transport system

Increase public transport share of trips made to and from 

Sydney’s central business district to 75%.

Increase the journeys to work in the Sydney metropolitan 

region by public transport to 25% by 2016.

Safer roads Road fatalities continue to fall relative to distance 

traveled.

Growing 

prosperity 

across New 

South Wales

New South 

Wales: open for 

business

Maintain and invest 

in infrastructure

Maintain average growth of 4.6% in capital expenditure.

Environment 

for living

Practical 

environmental 

solutions

Cleaner air and 

progress on greenhouse 

gas emissions

Meet national air quality goals in New South Wales.

Cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050.

Improved urban 

environments

Jobs closer to home Increase the number of people who live within 30 

minutes of a city or major center of public transport 

in metropolitan Sydney.

Improve the efficiency 

of the road network 

Maintain current travel speeds on Sydney’s major road 

corridors despite increase in travel volumes.
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 15

“Congestion and maintenance were not on the government 

radar because they didn’t think they were on the public radar. 

It came up from the bottom and became state priorities 

(during the public involvement process). People were 

concerned about congestion and wanted roads maintained. 

They did not want a lot of new highways, but they did want 

congestion and maintenance addressed,” said an RTA official. 

As a result, the priorities in the RTA Blueprint and Results 

and Services Plan can be directly traced to the priorities 

expressed by the state’s taxpayers.

Swedish Performance Strategy

The central government of Sweden and its main transportation agency, SRA, also demonstrate clear linkages between 

the nation’s overarching goals and how those goals are 

incorporated into the agency’s transportation performance 

management system. SRA manages the road network for the 

nation of 9 million people spread across a landmass the size 

of California. 

SRA demonstrates a robust performance management 

system that cascades national transportation performance 

goals throughout the agency and down to local governments. SRA receives few mandates or prescriptive performance requirements from its ministry, yet it still manages to 

translate the general guidance into detailed performance 

measures that direct the agency to achieve broad 

national goals. SRA expressed six broad goals to 

enable the transportation department to achieve the 

overall national objectives for transportation:

`An accessible transportation system

`High transportation quality

`Safe traffic

`Good environment

`Gender equality

`Efficient operations

From those, SRA negotiated a comprehensive set of 

18 objectives supported by more than 300 individual 

performance measures it developed for both internal 

and external reporting. Hard targets for those measures 

were negotiated between the agency and the ministry. 

For instance, its target was to reduce traffic fatalities by 

another 20 in 2009 as a short-term milestone toward 

a national vision of zero fatalities. It also targeted a 

department reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 

70,000 tons in 2009 as a short-term milestone toward 

reducing national carbon emissions. Both targets were 

negotiated with the central government. If SRA fails to 

achieve them, the performance is noted and a determination 

is made on what tactics are needed to achieve the goal in 

following years.

Even without prescriptive mandates, SRA has set clear goals 

on which it has achieved considerable progress in core 

business areas, including the following:

`Fatalities in the past 10 years have trended downward with 

fewer than 400 deaths on the state highway system in 

2009, a per capita number well below U.S. and European 

averages.

`The number of short trips taken by foot, bicycle, or bus 

have increased 14 percent since 1999.

`The miles of road treated with center median guardrail or 

center rumble strips quadrupled in 10 years.

`Pavement conditions have steadily increased on formerly 

unimproved rural roads, while paved state routes have 

sustained a high condition of smoothness.

`Transit and rail passenger service has expanded 

significantly.

Victoria Strategic Approach

The Australian state of Victoria has a long-established 

performance management framework (figure 1) that 

has articulated goals for its transportation agencies. 

▲

Management

Cycle

▼

▲ ▼

Figure 1. The Victorian planning and accountability cycle.
16 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

The performance management framework has evolved 

through several iterations of state plans in the southeastern 

Australian state of 5.2 million people. The state’s highway 

agency, known as VicRoads, and its transit agency, known as 

the Department of Transport, have long been recognized for 

their highly developed performance management systems.

The state’s central government articulated a recent Victorian 

Transport Plan, which was developed by two state ministries, 

the Ministry for Public Transport and the Ministry for Roads 

and Ports. It significantly expanded the performance objectives for transportation beyond traditional highway condition 

performance measures. It specified six action priorities for the 

transportation agencies, including the following:

`Shaping Victoria, or linking jobs, services, and homes

`Linking rural, regional, and metropolitan Victoria so 

all parts of the state share in prosperity

`Creating a metro system, or increasing the frequency, 

reliability, and safety of trains and trams

`Moving around Melbourne, or closing transportation 

gaps and improving safety on the crowded Melbourne 

road and transit network

`Taking practical steps for a sustainable future, or moving 

toward a sustainable and lower emission transportation 

network

`Strengthening Victoria’s economy by linking jobs, 

economic growth, and prosperity through transportation

The strategic priorities of reshaping the transportation 

network in the face of overwhelming population growth 

created a profound impact on the agency’s strategic goals. 

Its officials expressed an overriding focus on integrating 

land use and transportation, improving personal mobility, 

deemphasizing vehicle movement in lieu of moving people, 

and reducing transport’s greenhouse gas emissions. As a 

result, the goals and performance metrics of the transportation agencies have evolved to include these priorities as 

well as traditional measures of highway condition and 

performance and organizational efficiency.

Victoria’s transportation performance management system 

could be described as an advanced “posthighway era” or 

“sustainability era” transportation performance management 

system. Although its performance report retains its state-ofthe-art reporting on highway conditions, it has advanced 

into additional areas of measuring sustainability and land 

use integration. In fact, the Department of Transport’s 

secretary said he has concluded that land use planning and 

transportation planning are virtually the same. If his agency 

is to achieve the state’s economic development and sustainability goals, it will need to measure its success by how well 

it links land use and transportation. The agency’s performance management system is evolving to ensure the agency’s 

transportation outcomes link to these evolving societal 

objectives.

New Zealand Transport Agency

Strategic Approach

The lightly populated but geographically diverse island nation 

of New Zealand is known in transportation circles for its 

advanced asset management and performance management 

processes. Those processes remain in place, but are undergoing 

a shift in priorities as a new government implements a new 

direction in national transport policy. The new government is 

strongly promoting improvements to national highway 

corridors as a component of a national economic development strategy. As a result, the transportation agency’s performance management system is shifting rapidly to respond to 

and incorporate the new government objectives. The New 

Zealand experience in 2009 provided an example of how 

a longstanding performance management system shifts 

priorities to respond to changing social objectives.

New Zealand is a nation of only 4.2 million spread over two 

major islands that combined are the size of Great Britain. 

With its diverse terrain and relatively small population, the 

nation faces significant transportation challenges, both in 

sustaining its internal transportation network and shipping 

exports to international markets. NZTA was created in 2008 

by merging Transit New Zealand, the highway agency, and 

Land Transport New Zealand, the funding and planning 

agency. Despite the country’s small size, it has been cited 

frequently in international studies of best practices in asset 

management and safety. 

NZTA is a crown entity administered by a board of up to 

eight apolitical professionals appointed by the minister of 

transport guided by State Services Commission guidelines. 

NZTA is headed by a chief executive, who reports to the 

board and has a team of 11 senior managers. This creates a 

dynamic in which the political priorities of the majority party 

set policy direction for the transportation agency, which is 

run on a day-to-day basis by longtime professional staff. One 

senior ministry official described the arrangement in sports 

terms. “The government gets to make the rules. But we have 

our players on the field and we can influence them so they 

know the game plan and are well coached. We in ministry 

have to help the government be a good coach.”
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 17

The strategic framework begins with the periodic updating 

of the New Zealand Transport Strategy, a long-range 

strategic plan with a horizon of up to 30 years (figure 2). 

When new government elections are held every 3 years, the 

parliamentary majority forms a government and adopts a 

Government Policy Statement, which spells out its detailed 

transportation policies and associated spending priorities for 

the next 6 years and outlines a further 4-year forecast for a 

total of 10 years. However, the statement must be updated 

every 3 years. The NZTA Investment and Revenue Strategy 

is developed from both the government’s policies and the 

long-range agency strategic plan. The strategy provides a 

direct link between the Government Policy Statement and 

the National Land Transport Programme and demonstrates 

how the program carries out government priorities.

An additional intermediate link is the Statement of Intent, 

a forward-looking 3-year plan updated annually that spells 

out how the agency will link its efforts with the Government 

Policy Statement. The Statement of Intent is similar to a 

business plan in that it sets the agency’s budgets and priorities 

and demonstrates how it intends to make progress on the 

Government Policy Statement priorities over 10 years.

Next the agency updates the National Land Transport 

Programme (NLTP), which sets out the allocation of funds 

to transport activities for the next 3 years. It is similar to a 

Transportation Improvement Program in the United States. 

The NLTP lists the activities and projects to be funded. The 

NZTA program includes projects it will manage as well as the 

allocations to local governments for projects and maintenance 

Figure 2. New Zealand’s performance management steps.

New Zealand Transport Strategy

20–30 Year Horizon

Government Policy Statement

6–10 Year Horizon

National Land

Transport Programme

NZTA Input

On National

Activities

Regional Land

Transport Programme

Regional Land

Transport Strategies

Long-Term Council

Community Plans

Guides

Guides

Guides

Guides

Guides Guides

Input

Input Input

Determines

Central Government Process

Local Government Process

NZTA Process

Input

Determines

Guides

KEY
18 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

activities they will develop. The NLTP also describes the 

significant issues facing land transport and includes a 10-year 

forecast of anticipated revenues and expenditures. From the 

funding provided by NZTA and the money raised by local 

authorities through rates, the regions develop transport 

programs, which include projects and maintenance activities 

sponsored by the local governments. Local authorities develop 

10-year plans called Long-Term Council Community Plans, 

which must be updated every 3 years. These set the levels of 

service for funding. Projects for financial assistance must be 

assessed as part of the Regional Land Transport Programme, 

which is guided by the Regional Land Transport Strategy 

(RLTS.) The RLTS is often guided by regional growth 

management, economic development, and spatial strategies. 

Substantial input on local programs and local asset management practices come in the form of legally required asset 

management practices, which NZTA evaluates.

NZTA and its predecessor agencies conclude their performance management cycle with annual reports. The new 

merged agency, NZTA, produced its first annual report for 

the financial year 2008, ending June 30, 2009. The report 

had extensive metrics to document agency performance in 

achieving the Statement of Intent and illustrate how that 

performance linked to larger governmental goals. 

British Transportation Performance 

Management Strategy

For the past decade, the British have evolved a performance 

management system in which the central government’s 

approach shifted from setting many precise performance 

targets for its transportation agencies to setting broader, more 

general goals. National, regional, and local transportation 

agencies develop their own metrics and business plans to carry 

out the national goals. Regular reporting of results provides 

feedback to the central government on how effectively its 

priorities are being achieved by the complex network of 

central, regional, and local transportation agencies, as well as 

by the many private contractors who operate in the highly 

privatized British transportation system. 

The performance management framework applies to the 

transportation network in England, with separate governance 

structures in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

The main British transportation agency is the Department for 

Transport, which oversees both HA and monitors the private 

contractors who operate the nation’s rail passenger system. 

HA improves, operates, and maintains strategic roads for the 

51 million people in England, who live in a 50,000-square-mi 

(129,499-square-km) nation about the size of Alabama.

The British governance structure is substantially different 

from that in the United States. This may reflect the Next Step 

movement in the 1980s and privatization initiatives in the 

transportation sector in the 1980s and 1990s.

The day-to-day responsibility for strategic roads lies with HA, 

a semiautonomous arm of the Department for Transport with 

its own board and chief executive. The relationship between 

HA and the Department for Transport is formalized. The 

department approves and sets HA’s budget and agrees to 

its business plan and targets. HA is responsible for delivery. 

In delivering some of its functions, HA relies on contracts 

with external organizations and commercial companies. 

For example, routine maintenance is provided by private 

companies under contracts let by competitive tender.

As a result of privatization, passenger rail services are 

also provided by private companies, in this case operating 

franchises and contracting directly with the Department 

for Transport. Service levels and certain types of fares are 

controlled by the Department for Transport, with companies either paying a premium or receiving a subsidy (contracts are let after a competition). In this case remedial 

action, including financial penalties, may be taken against 

rail operators that fail to provide acceptable services.

The Department for Transport operates under five broad 

strategic goals that it negotiates with the central government:

`Support national economic competitiveness and growth

by delivering reliable and efficient transport networks.

`Reduce transport’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other 

greenhouse gases, with the desired outcome of tackling 

climate change.

`Contribute to better safety, security, health, and longer life 

expectancy by reducing the risk of death, injury, or illness 

arising from transportation and promoting travel modes 

beneficial to health.

`Promote greater equality of opportunity for all citizens, 

with the desired outcome of achieving a fairer society.

`Improve the quality of life for transport users and 

nontransport users and promote a healthy natural 

environment.

From those five flow an extensive performance management 

structure that measures dozens of aspects of British transportation performance. Most individual targets are not set by the 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 19

central government, but are developed by the transportation 

agencies for measuring success on achieving the national goals. 

Top-level targets are approved by ministers. The implementing agencies include HA and various regional and local 

agencies that receive government transportation funds.

From the Department for Transport strategic goals flow the 

objectives for HA, which has an aim of “safe roads, reliable 

journeys, informed travelers.” HA’s objectives are the 

following:

`Reduce delay and congestion on the strategic road 

network by delivering sustainable capacity improvements, making journey time more reliable.

`Influence customers’ travel behavior and decisions by 

making network information more readily available.

`Improve road safety by maintaining the network in a 

safe and serviceable condition.

`Enhance the environment by mitigating the potentially 

adverse impact of the strategic road network and supporting the department’s environment and climate 

change objectives.

`Provide an effective Traffic Officer Service (figure 3).

`Seek and respond to feedback from customers.

`Deliver efficiency and value-for-money savings and 

improvements.

Figure 3. Great Britain’s performance management 

approach spurred increased efforts to manage congestion.

Queensland Performance Management

The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads 

displays another well-articulated strategic management 

framework in which broad, catalytic state goals flow through 

a performance management process in the transportation 

agency down to the individual project and activity level. 

Queensland is Australia’s most rapidly growing state, with 

a population of 4.2 million spread across a huge landmass 

twice the size of Texas. Queensland is a diverse state that 

includes the upscale Miami Beach-like Gold Coast, the 

Great Barrier Reef, and thousands of square miles of 

sparsely populated interior. 

The state and municipal governments have been coping 

with significant urban population growth and have invested 

heavily in an integrated, multimodal transportation network. The emphasis on integration extended to a recent 

merger of Queensland Transport, the former transit agency, 

with the Queensland Department of Main Roads to form 

the Department of Transport and Main Roads. 

For more than a decade, the two agencies operated under a 

state strategic transportation plan. In 2008, the Queensland 

minister for transport, trade, employment, and industrial 

relations and the minister for main roads and local government jointly developed the updated state transportation plan 

known as the Transport Coordination Plan for Queensland 

(figure 4, see next page). This plan set the strategic direction 

for both the highway and transit agencies before and after 

their merger. It expressed the strategic context and challenges 

facing the state. The state is coping with rapid growth, high 

congestion, automobile dependency, environmental changes, 

high community expectations, a threatened quality of life, 

and diverse regions with differing transportation needs. The 

Transport Coordination Plan laid out 10 strategic objectives 

for the transportation agencies:

`Make the most of the existing transportation network 

by balancing demand and supply of infrastructure and 

services to maximize efficiency.

`Invest in Queensland’s transport system by targeting 

investment to achieve the best value for industry and 

the community.

`Keep the system working well by ensuring the transport 

system performs well and accommodates the changing 

travel patterns and requirements of society and 

industry.

`Get people walking, cycling, and using public transport 

by increasing the share of trips made by public transport, 

walking, and cycling and providing alternatives to private 

car use.

`Support regional and remote communities by connecting 

them to essential services to support economic development and social cohesion.
20 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

`Move freight efficiently by contributing to a strong 

and diverse trading environment.

`Make transport safer by reducing transport-related 

incidents, fatalities, and injuries.

`Make transport more secure by protecting personal 

security and the integrity of the transport network.

`Care for the natural and built environment by contributing to a cleaner, healthier, and more livable environment 

for all Queenslanders.

`Integrate transport planning and land use by matching 

transport and land use patterns to enhance livability 

and trade.

The Department of Transport and Main Roads converts 

these broad goals into an increasingly specific set of 

reports and metrics by which it can assess—and be 

measured—on how well it is implementing 

the state government’s overall transportation 

aspirations, including the following:

`It adopts a 5-year strategic plan derived 

directly from the 10-year state plan. 

`It adopts a specific list of projects, called 

the Roads Implementation Plan, which 

has a detailed 2-year list of projects to 

be delivered and a rolling 3-year list of 

projects under development. The Roads 

Implementation Plan appeared to be 

similar to a Transportation Improvement 

Program in a U.S. metropolitan region. 

`Annually, the department produces a 

highly detailed and quantified Service 

Delivery Statement, a public report on 

what it plans to achieve in the upcoming 

budget year.

`Every quarter it produces a Board of 

Management Report to the cabinet 

agency on its progress on the Service 

Delivery Statement.

`It develops an annual report that specifies what it accomplished in the Service 

Delivery Statement and through overall 

efforts in the past fiscal year.

The scan team’s overall impression after 

reviewing the Queensland process and 

interviewing its officials was that the state 

has created strong linkages between its 

strategic goals and the day-to-day activities 

of its transportation agencies.

Broad Goals, Negotiated Targets, 

Ongoing Collaboration 

Despite the greater linkage of national goals to agency 

activities, the central governments mandated few explicit and 

quantitative national transportation targets for the transportation agencies. It appeared that as the agencies’ performance 

management systems matured, the central government shifted 

from insisting on precise performance targets to monitoring 

long-term system trends.

The scan team seldom found one level of government 

mandating the performance of another. Rather, the servicelevel agreements or other negotiated documents between the 

central government and the transportation agency were used 

Figure 4. The Queensland transportation agencies have 

a well-articulated performance management system.

State Transport Coordination Plan

2008–2018

Transport and Main Roads 

Strategic Plan

2008–2013

Roads Implementation Plan

2-Year Project List

Rural Regional 

Plan

Urban Regional 

Plan

Service Delivery Statement 

Annual

Board of Management

Report Quarterly

Annual Department Report
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 21

to define performance measures and targets for which the 

transportation agency was held accountable. The service-level 

agreements communicated priorities and clarified outcomes 

while allowing each state or region to negotiate measures 

and priorities important to its unique circumstances. These 

negotiations were supported by extensive data collection that 

showed trends in systemwide performance. Negotiations 

between the agencies and their central governments were fluid 

and continuous. Flexibility in adopting strategies and targets 

was key, particularly in major cities with unique transportation needs and solutions. 

The combination of national goals cascading into state or 

regional performance measures appeared to create a greater 

emphasis on outcomes than on process. Results, not 

process, appeared to be what was closely monitored. 

New Zealand Government Policy 

Statement

The New Zealand system was typical of what the scan team 

found in its study. A Government Policy Statement spells 

out broad objectives for transportation. The transportation 

agency produces a Revenue Investment Strategy and a 

Statement of Intent to articulate how it intends to invest 

in transport and achieve the central government’s broad 

transportation goals.

“This structure requires the government to say, ‘This is what 

we want you to achieve,’” said a New Zealand official. “One of 

the critical points is a mechanism for government to articulate 

its policies and for the agency to have a dialog about those 

priorities.” 

The 2009 New Zealand Government Policy Statement for 

transportation includes no hard, numeric targets. The only 

numbers in the document are for budget appropriations—

minimum and maximum investment ranges for each investment category. However, it provides clear strategic direction 

on what it wants from NZTA.

“The government’s priority for its investment in land transport 

is to increase economic productivity and growth in New 

Zealand,” said the Government Policy Statement. “Quality land 

transport infrastructure and services are an essential part of a 

robust economy. They enable people and businesses to access 

employment and markets throughout the country and link 

them to international markets through the nation’s ports and 

airports. Investing in high-quality infrastructure projects that 

support the efficient movement of freight and people is critical.”

The Government Policy Statement lists seven national 

corridors as part of a Roads of National Significance network. 

It directs NZTA to focus resources on these routes to achieve 

economic growth and productivity. It designates the routes as 

the nation’s most important and says they require significant 

investment to reduce congestion, improve safety, and support 

economic growth. 

“In pursuing economic growth and productivity, the government also expects to see progress on other objectives. The Land 

Transport Management Act 2003 requires the Government 

Policy Statement to contribute to achieving an affordable, 

integrated, safe, responsive and sustainable land transport 

system, and also to each of the following:

`Assisting economic development

`Assisting safety and personal security

`Improving access and mobility

`Protecting and promoting public health

`Ensuring environmental sustainability”

The following are other impacts the Government Policy 

Statement sets for the agency:

`Improvements in journey time reliability

`Easing of severe congestion

`More efficient freight supply chains

`Better use of existing transport capacity

`Better access to markets, employment, and areas 

that contribute to economic growth

`A secure and resilient transport network

`Reductions in deaths and serious injuries as a result 

of road crashes

`More transport choices, particularly for those with 

limited access to a car, where appropriate

`Reductions in adverse environmental effects from 

land transport

`Contributions to positive health outcomes

After the Government Policy Statement is published, the 

agency develops its Revenue and Investment Strategy and 

negotiates its Statement of Intent with the government, 

Two important exceptions to the rule 

that the central government did

not set hard targets were in safety and 

greenhouse gas emission reductions.
22 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

setting out what it will achieve during the next 3 financial 

years. The Statement of Intent explains how it will spend 

the government’s resources to achieve its desired ends.

“The government has provided clear expectations for service 

delivery for the financial year 2009–2010 and out-years,” 

stated NZTA’s Statement of Intent. “This clarity has 

enabled the organization to focus on what matters most, 

and to develop five business priorities to ensure organizational resources, behaviours and decisions give effect to 

the government’s intent. Over the coming three financial 

years there will be a particular focus on improving road 

safety, improving the effectiveness of public transport, 

improving the efficiency of freight movements, planning 

for and delivering roads of national significance, and 

improving customer service and reducing compliance 

costs.”

The Statement of Intent sets comprehensive targets, such as 

achieving 90 percent of all project development milestones 

on the Roads of National Significance, achieving specific 

travel time goals on major routes, and receiving a 75 percent 

satisfaction rating in surveys of road users. The Statement of 

Intent includes 64 such comprehensive performance measures. Most are cumulative, programmatic measures, such as 

achieving a certain level of pavement condition across the 

entire network. Listed with each group of measures is the 

accompanying budget expenditures. This pairing allows the 

agency to link its budget inputs with its desired outputs and 

illustrate how those outputs achieve the government’s 

objectives.

As a result, the New Zealand system produces clear measures 

of expenditure and accomplishment, but without a set of 

rigid, centrally mandated targets. Instead, the targets are 

negotiated between the political minister and the professional 

staff of the transportation agency.

British Public Service Agreements

Similar to the Statements of Intent in New Zealand are 

the Public Service Agreements in Great Britain. The Public 

Service Agreement is a widely used device to set goals 

between units of government (figure 5). The Department 

for Transport has a Public Service Agreement with Treasury 

to specify the department’s performance goals for a budget 

cycle. Likewise, the department has developed agreements 

with local governments for 10 major urban areas with 

accompanying measures that underpin the indicators in 

its own Public Service Agreement.

The British experience over the past 12 years has been 

movement toward negotiated agreements and away from 

a large number of mandated targets. The number of 

measures, targets, and mandates has steadily fallen and the 

process has evolved from a hierarchical, mandate-driven 

one to a more collaborative one. The British experience 

provides a cautionary tale on the use of centralized 

performance metrics. In the initial stages of British 

performance management in the 1990s, the number 

of metrics proliferated to a cumbersome level. Central 

government imposed an estimated 2,000 metrics on local 

government and about 600 across national departments. 

From 2000 to 2009, those metrics were steadily consolidated 

to 188 for local government and 30 across national departments. The Department for Transport now primarily 

operates under one Public Service Agreement with 

underlying indicators.

Not only have the measures on local governments fallen 

from 2,000 to 198, but local governments only have to set 

targets for up to 35 of those measures, along with 18 mandatory targets for education and children’s services. The local 

governments agree on up to 35 targets, based on which 

improvements are most important to the local community. 

Local governments report the values of the other measures, 

Figure 5. The British rely on service agreements

to implement government goals.

Understanding the Outcome

What is the result you want to achieve?

How does the target relate to

the outcome?

Model of Causation

What are the causal factors which 

influence the results?

Model of What Works

What policy intervention will

make a difference?

What is the evidence?

Map of Delivery Agents

Who does delivery rely upon?

Evidence Base

Published

Delivery

Reports

Detailed

Operational

Delivery

Plans
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 23

but they are used only as indicators of condition or 

trends, not specific targets that have to be met. 

British transportation officials emphasized that the dialogue 

between the various levels of government in negotiating 

and monitoring the Public Service Agreements was as 

important—or perhaps more important—than the setting 

of the hard performance targets. The setting of targets 

and the continuous dialogue on how to best achieve them 

resulted in increased consensus, alignment, and understanding between the central government and the transportation 

agencies it funds. 

British officials said the current system began in 1998 when 

a process called the Comprehensive Spending Review was 

initiated. In that process, the central parliamentary government prepared 3-year spending plans and developed Public 

Service Agreements with each national department on its 

expenditures for the priorities it would pursue. They cited 

the following as strengths of their system:

`The government makes a clear statement on its priorities.

`It creates an outcome-oriented approach to budgeting 

and governing.

`It sharpens accountability to the electorate, U.K. 

Parliament, and European Union.

`It forces government and the agencies to balance 

priorities with revenue.

`It promotes value-for-money considerations.

`It provides agencies with a medium-term 

framework for planning, but with maximum flexibility on how to achieve the 

government’s desired outcomes.

An example of a key Public Service Agreement 

is Delivery Agreement 5: “Deliver reliable 

and efficient transport networks that support 

economic growth.” The Treasury is the 

government entity that works on behalf of 

the prime minister to negotiate the Public 

Service Agreement with the Department 

for Transport. It set a broad government 

goal of having “reliable and efficient transport 

networks that support economic growth.” 

From that goal, the government and the 

Department for Transport negotiated the 

following indicators (not hard targets):

`Journey time on main roads into urban 

areas—This indicator relates to journey 

times on key routes into the 10 largest urban areas during 

the morning rush hour.

`Journey time reliability on the strategic road network, 

as measured by the average delay experienced in the 

worst 10 percent of journeys for each monitored route—

This indicator focuses on the delay experienced in the 

worst 10 percent of journeys. 

`Level of capacity and crowding on the rail network—

The target is linked to the government’s high-level 

output specification for the rail network, which details 

the passenger numbers to be accommodated and the 

load factors to be achieved.

`Average benefit-cost ratio of investments approved—

The indicator relates to the expected level of benefits to 

be obtained from investments approved in the period.

Sweden’s Operational Plan and Reports

SRA operates under a similar framework in which Parliament 

issues broad, qualitative goals to the transportation agency in 

its annual budget process (figure 6). These directives contain 

few metrics and the entire document may be less than 10 

pages of general discussion on what Parliament wants SRA 

to focus on.

SRA incorporates this periodic guidance into two key 

documents. One is SRA’s Strategic Plan, which includes an 

intermediate horizon of 10 years and key priorities articulated 

by the government. On a short-term basis, SRA produces a 

Figure 6. The Swedish system translates broad government

goals into agency action plans.

Goals and demands stipulated by the principal (Government)

Vision and mission

Strategic goals and strategies

Balanced scorecards

and operations

plans

Evaluation

Policy

documents

Basic values and 

characteristics

Followup and 

reports
24 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

much more detailed Operational Plan and a short-range 

document that focuses on activities in the upcoming budget 

cycle. The Operational Plan is influenced by government 

priorities, parliamentary direction, and the extensive public 

outreach process Sweden deploys. In a nation of 9 million 

people, 9,000 are annually surveyed on their satisfaction with 

a number of basic issues. These include traditional issues, such 

as pavement smoothness, winter snow and ice control, and 

how promptly they received a driver’s license from the 

licensing bureau. But other measures are much more personal. 

SRA found that 66 percent of parents report their children 

have a safe route to school, while up to 10 percent believe 

their child’s route is very unsafe. The results of these surveys, 

as well as a customer satisfaction index and input from 

Customer Councils, are combined with parliamentary 

direction to influence the Operational Plan. 

Directly from the Operational Plan flows a Balanced Scorecard reporting process. The Balanced Scorecard reporting is 

scalable throughout the agency. A summary report rolls up 

agency performance. However, the performance of individual 

units or districts also can be reported. All results are on an 

agency Web network and are shared with the government 

ministries.

SRA officials said, however, that the most valuable part of 

their reporting process—at least in communicating with the 

central government—are the frequent update meetings they 

hold with budget officials in the ministries. SRA must provide 

four mandatory update reports on its Operational Plan and 

Balanced Scorecard accomplishments. However, much more 

frequent and informal communication occurs, providing 

continuous opportunities for budget officials to understand 

the progress, challenges, and issues confronting SRA. 

New South Wales Agreements

Similar to the U.K. Public Service Agreements, the New 

South Wales RTA generates a Results and Services Plan and 

a Budget Paper that specify how it will spend its budget, 

what priorities it has, what targets it expects to meet, and 

what activities it seeks to accomplish during the budget 

period. Senior agency officials described the Results and 

Services Plan as a contract-like document that specifies how 

they will invest AUD4.4 billion in state and federal funds.

While the Results and Services Plan is a private document 

given to the state government, the two annual Budget Papers 

are public documents that explain spending to achieve 

government transport priorities (figure 7). One is a 30-page 

document that lists major budget expenditures, general 

accomplishments, areas of policy emphasis, the status of 

major projects, and key indicators of performance proposed 

by the agency. The other is a much longer Infrastructure 

Figure 7. New South Wales translates government strategy into measureable outputs. 

NSW RTA Budget Process

Strategy

Inputs

Outputs

Unplanned Cabinet

Submissions Invitation

to Enhancement of

Effort Bids

State Funding

Forward Estimates

Current + 3 Years

Commonwealth

Funding

RSP

Current + 3 Years

Budget Papers

Current Years

Agreed TAM

10-Year Outlook

RSP

Current + 3 Years

Propose TAM

10-Year Outlook
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 25

Statement that addresses investments in sustaining and 

improving all forms of the state infrastructure, including 

transportation. These two documents reflect the parallel 

nature of the New South Wales budgeting process and 

accountability process. One aspect focuses on shorter term 

operations, while the other focuses on longer term total 

asset management priorities.

Among the operational performance indicators it reports are 

the following:

`The benefit of the development program, with a target of 

AUD4.6 billion 

`The estimated travel speed on major urban routes during 

morning peak travel times, with a target of 30 kilometers 

per hour (km/h) (18 miles per hour (mi/h))

`Ride quality, or smoothness of state roads (percent good 

versus percent poor), with a target of 89

`Fatalities per 100,000 population

`Total greenhouse gas emissions

Agency officials said the targets in the Results and Services 

Plan, Budget Papers, and total asset management plan are 

realistic ones they set after negotiating with state government 

officials. “Imposing targets is likely to be ineffective and we 

prefer the carrot to the stick. If you set an imposed target, you 

will get resistance constantly. We say, ‘you give us the target 

and we will work with you on whether it is the right target,’” is 

how one agency executive described the target-setting process.

Although setting reasonable targets involves negotiation, 

once targets are set clear processes are in place to ensure 

progress toward achieving them. A monthly performance 

meeting between agency managers and the chief executive 

officer focuses on progress on accomplishing the agency goals, 

targets, and business plan. They use an internal dashboard for 

each measure and only spend time talking about areas in red, 

which are out of tolerance. They limit agency executives to a 

two-sentence explanation during the fast-paced meeting to 

explain how they will get performance back on target.

Periodic oversight from what are called the Central Agencies 

further enhances accountability. The New South Wales 

Treasury and the Auditor General conduct periodic performance audits and oversight functions to ensure achievement 

of agency performance goals.

Agency officials described the budgeting process as a “results 

budget” that compels the agency to think about important 

societal outcomes and decide what the public wants from 

government services. Instead of merely processing driver’s 

licenses, officials think about producing more competent 

drivers. Instead of building highways, they consider whether 

they provide reliable journeys or high-performing highway 

assets. They described the results budgeting process as an 

ever-progressing evolution to link changing societal needs 

with the agency’s performance. An official said the agency 

wants metrics that contribute to a performance culture. 

The New South Wales budget and performance management 

processes are closely linked to a long-term total asset management approach that is legislatively mandated throughout the 

state. The New South Wales Treasury oversees a statewide 

total asset management approach that applies to all state 

assets, including highways, state buildings, information 

technology networks, water systems, and other public assets. 

The New South Wales RTA manages an extensive Total Asset 

Management Manual that covers all phases of an asset’s life 

cycle, from planning through retirement. This manual drives 

a total asset management plan, which is closely linked to the 

budgeting and performance process.

The agency plans a 10-year transportation asset management 

strategy operated in parallel with the 3-year Results and 

Services Plan. The intention is to keep the shorter term 

political budgeting process linked to long-term highway 

asset management needs. As described later in this report, 

the syncing of the budget and asset management processes has 

not resulted in the total amount of investment that the agency 

identified. However, the linkage has clearly illustrated longterm asset needs as part of the short-term budgeting cycle.

As in other agencies, New South Wales transportation 

officials said the dialogue and increased understanding 

that comes from the negotiation and reporting process 

is an important benefit of the integrated performance 

management budgeting approach. 

Victoria Department of Transport 

Focus Reports

Similar to the New South Wales RTA, the Victoria 

Department of Transport produces voluminous accountability documents that set out detailed aspirations based on state 

and regional goals. Its short-term priorities are strongly 

influenced by the state’s focus on coping with rising congestion and environmental impacts caused by the substantial 

growth the region is experiencing. The short-term objectives 

the Department of Transport pursues stem directly from the 

long-term state goals to further integrate transportation with 
26 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS

land use, offer more transportation choices, reduce emissions, 

and improve the overall sustainability of the region. Because 

of the many similarities to the process used in New South 

Wales, the Victoria process of setting short-term targets will 

not be described in detail. One difference is that it appeared 

the focus on land use and transportation integration is even 

more pronounced in Victoria.

Victoria officials describe how their outcome-driven approach 

has influenced even their accounting process. They said the 

state moved from cash-based accounting to accrual-based 

accounting as part of an effort to clearly link expenditures 

with outcomes. They said the historical approach to public 

sector financial management in Victoria and other jurisdictions was to apply cash budgeting and reporting. Management 

of services was based on programs with a focus on inputs to 

the government instead of outcomes for the public. Department assets and liabilities were not financially recognized in 

annual reports, and the overhead costs of leave and pensions 

were reported by the central Department of Taxation and 

Finance, not the transportation agencies. By moving to 

accrual-based accounting, the future liability of accumulated 

pensions, leave, and infrastructure needs can be recognized on 

the transportation department’s books.

As a result, departmental services could not be fully costed on 

a competitive and neutral basis with other agencies or the 

private sector. Further, the input focus did not promote 

achievement of actual service delivery outputs. A reform 

process in the 1990s instituted a much more outcome-focused 

budgeting process that fully accounted for all agency costs to 

provide services, including all department overhead. 

Victoria DOT 3-Year Priorities

Priorities Strategies

Integrate transport and 

land use planning

•	Shape Melbourne and regional Victoria to reduce the amount and 

distance of travel.

•	Ensure legislative and governance arrangements support emerging 

transport challenges.

•	Improve long-term planning and secure strategic reservations.

Support the Victorian 

economy with an effective 

and resilient transport 

system

•	Increase the capacity of the transport system.

•	Maximize the operation and use of the existing transport system.

•	Improve the accessibility and service quality of the transport system 

and address transport disadvantage.

Ensure safety for all 

transport users

•	Ensure safer roads, roadsides, vehicles, and users.

•	Ensure safer public transport services and create personal safety of 

public transport users.

•	Ensure safety and security of freight transport.

•	Ensure safer waterways.

Improve the sustainability 

of Victorian transport

•	Support mode shift to more sustainable travel modes.

•	Improve the environmental efficiency of transport activity and the 

transport fleet.

•	Mitigate the impact of transport activities and adapt to the effects of 

climate change.

Build a collaborative and 

effective organization

•	Transform the culture of the department to maximize performance on 

behalf of the community.

•	Improve program development and delivery and risk management.

•	Communicate effectively with the community, industry, and other 

government agencies.

Table 2. Victoria priorities and strategies.
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 27

As a result of the budget and programming reforms, the 

Victoria Department of Transport now expresses more 

of its programs in terms of outcomes to the public and 

alignment to long-term goals.

As emphasized in the other agency examples, the state 

government has not imposed hard targets on the Victoria 

Department of Transport. However, its performance 

management and performance budgeting processes have 

evolved consistently so that they now link their programs 

to outcomes that support broader government objectives 

(figure 8). Agency officials said their plan aligns performance measures for each priority in the state plan and 

state budget priorities. 

Its 3-year and annual reports include achievements, 

such as the opening of a new section of highway. 

It includes outputs, such as the miles of road that meet 

pavement smoothness goals. It also reports outcomes, 

such as an improvement in travel time as a result of 

the new projects. 

Figure 8. Victoria’s performance pyramid illustrates linkages 

between broad government goals and agency services.

Growing Victoria Together 

Government Vision and 

Outcome Statement

Medium-term 

objectives agreed 

by government

Services delivered 

by department

as agreed by 

government

Government

outcomes,

measures

Departmental

objectives and

performance measures

Outputs and performance measures

(quality, quantity, timeliness and cost)
28 LINKING TRANSPORTATION PROGRAMS WITH GOVERNMENT GOALS
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 29

Performance-Driven Funding 

Allocations: A Difficult Goal

T

he agencies visited clearly documented system and 

organizational performance, often in detailed trends 

over a number of years. The richness of reporting 

and actions was usually quite sophisticated. The 

agencies demonstrated improved customer satisfaction, 

higher reliability in transit and highway travel times, reduced 

environmental impacts, and greater efficiencies. Their performance management systems naturally dovetailed with asset 

management systems. The agencies demonstrated a keen 

knowledge of system conditions, system trends, and finely 

calibrated system need estimates, often by asset type and 

region. Clearly, the agencies benefited from managing their 

performance to maximize resources, optimize assets, and 

earn credibility from legislators and budgeting agencies.

Despite those benefits to both legislatures and agencies, 

budget appropriations were for the most part not driven

by the resources required to achieve specific performance 

targets. Generally, appropriations were not calibrated to the 

condition of specific asset classes. Performance management 

demonstrated how funds were spent and to what end, but 

the systems did not appear to include a feedback loop that 

triggered legislative appropriation decisions to sustain 

assets at an agreed-on level.

The scan team found no widespread evidence that legislatures 

or executive branch financial agencies establish asset investment levels based on data from performance management 

systems. Discussions indicated that this was because of 

overall funding constraints in competing public sectors, 

such as education and health care. It was not attributable to 

an ineffective performance management program or agency 

performance. Only New Zealand had a dedicated transport 

fund statutorily protected for transportation uses. All fuel 

excise duty is dedicated to transport. Excise duty is collected 

from gasoline sales, and light diesel vehicles and heavy vehicles 

pay road user charges based on vehicle weight and distance 

traveled. Other departments tended to compete with other 

government agencies for appropriations.

In three of the six cases, agencies reported discouragement 

that they could not convince legislators to invest more in 

system preservation, despite their sophisticated documentation of need. Further discussion noted that identifying large 

maintenance funding gaps was a longstanding concern. 

Similar to the United States, agencies had difficulty expressing 

the impact of changes in pavement and bridge condition at 

the political level.

Central government decisions on agency operating budgets 

tend to remain incremental. System preservation increases were 

modest and based on incremental increases from past budgets. 

Budget decisionmaking depended on whether the government 

had any residual revenue left once other priorities were met.

In Sweden, SRA officials presented three budget scenarios for 

long-term basic system preservation needs as part of a 10-year 

government budget forecasting effort. They presented a low, 

medium, and high scenario for the 10 years from 2010 to 

2021. They presented a low scenario of SEK117 billion 

(USD16.7 billion) over 10 years, which would make it possible 

to sustain maintenance standards at a functional level. Investments would be limited to funding projects in the current plan 

and meeting immediate needs. In the medium scenario, they 

would meet 75 percent of backlogged maintenance needs. In 

the high scenario, a 31 percent increase, they would meet all 

maintenance backlogs. They received in the long-term budget 

forecast an estimated appropriation for maintenance of 

SEK110 billion for 10 years, or slightly less than their lowest 

estimated need to sustain conditions (figure 9, see next page).

“For a long time we have talked about the maintenance 

mountain, but the problem . . . is they can’t translate that 

down to ‘What does that mean?’ We did get more maintenance money, but it came from politicians picking up the 

sentiment in their districts that there was discontent in the 

Chapter 3

Linking Budgets and Accomplishments
30 LINKING BUDGETS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

field. It became a political topic, more so than a technical 

debate” about how to fund maintenance, said an SRA official.

In New South Wales, officials said the national government 

has held maintenance expenditures level for several years at an 

amount that does not provide long-term sustainable funding. 

They said they rely heavily on state revenues to maintain their 

system at an acceptable condition level.

Queensland officials produce a sophisticated asset deterioration analysis that monetizes the value of all assets and forecasts 

their deterioration curves based on current expenditures. 

Their analysis indicates that only about 50 percent of needed 

long-term investment in system preservation is occurring. 

Despite their sophisticated analysis, they have not been able to 

convince Treasury officials to support a larger investment in 

system maintenance.

Victoria highway officials manage their assets under the 

requirements of a Road Management Act that requires 

sophisticated reporting and forecasting of the effort level 

needed to sustain conditions at an acceptable level (figure 

10). Even with the legislative foundation for identifying 

their maintenance needs, they said they struggle to 

convince central budget authorities to invest adequately 

in system maintenance. 

Figure 9. Swedish maintenance expenditures are below those for

new investment.

Figure 10. The Victoria Road Management Act requires a systematic and methodical asset management approach.

Although there appeared to be little direct 

linkage between system conditions and 

appropriations, the performance management systems were widely credited with 

documenting the agency’s efficiency and 

helping to defend transportation appropriations during the budgeting process. 

“Anything that focuses you on what you are 

actually achieving for your constituencies 

is worthwhile,” said one Victorian official 

in describing how the agency uses its road 

condition data to defend budget requests. 

One British official noted that while there is 

no mechanistic linkage between transporta16000

14000

12000

10000

8000

6000

4000

2000

0

— Maintenance

— Investment

198019811982198319841985198619871988198919901991199219931994199519961997199819992000200120022003200420052006200720082009

PHASE 1

Developing standards 

and guidelines

Maintenance strategies

Register of Public Roads

Road infrastructure register

Road infrastructure 

standards and guidelines

Road infrastructure 

performance targets

Mass and dimension 

limits for heavy vehicles

Program development 

guidelines

PHASE 2

Developing 

maintenance 

program

Road 

infrastructure 

performance 

gaps

Funding 

scenarios

Road 

infrastructure 

needs and 

priorities

Maintenance 

program

PHASE 3

Implementing

maintenance 

program

Specifications 

and surveilance 

plans

Works program

Records of 

maintenance 

inspections and 

completed work

Customer issues

Controlling 

heavy vehicles

PHASE 4

Auditing

Audit of 

completed 

works

Road 

infrastructure 

condition 

surveys

PHASE 5

Reviewing

Periodic review of :

• Road infrastructure 

performance

• Road infrastructure 

maintenance 

strategies

• Stakeholder 

requirements

• Customer feedback

Assess the effects of 

external influences

INPUTS

Government 

policies and 

regulation

Governmentset Key Result 

Areas and Key 

Performance 

Indicators

Maintenance 

budget
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 31

tion condition targets and the budget set by legislators or 

Treasury officials, the performance results were considered 

important in budget discussions. 

One agency stated that while its performance management 

did not garner a budget increase, elected officials viewed it 

as so effective that the agency was able to sustain its budget 

when others were cut. 

Depreciating Value of Transportation 

Assets

Another economic analysis common in the international 

agencies was the use of depreciation in networkwide assets to 

demonstrate financially whether the investment level is 

adequate to sustain the assets over time. The evaluation puts 

the issue of deferred maintenance into a quantifiable number 

that can be displayed as a liability on the organization’s books. 

The value of this type of analysis is to demonstrate in financial 

terms whether states or nations are accumulating future costs 

that will have to be incurred to return the transportation 

network assets to a serviceable condition. 

As a Swedish official said, it demonstrates to the central 

government the long-term costs of deferring maintenance. 

“We try to communicate that it is very expensive to be poor.” 

A Queensland official said the depreciation forecasts compel 

Treasury officials to confront the fact that not investing 

adequately in infrastructure maintenance increases the 

amount of annual depreciation the government faces. 

“When investment decisions reduce funding to 

rehabilitation and resurfacing, there is 

still a cost to government.”

Queensland Department of Transport 

and Main Roads displayed a sophisticated 

depreciation process, Roads Asset

Valuation, that relies on four inputs:

`Unit prices for construction of various 

assets

`Remaining useful life of assets already 

in service

`Highway assets’ rate of depreciation or 

deterioration

`Their residual value when exhausted

From these four variables, the agency 

computes whether current investment 

levels are adequate to offset the continual 

depreciation or deterioration consuming the remaining 

useful life of the highway assets in service. 

The agency derives the conditions of the assets from bridge, 

pavement, and other asset inventories. From the base case of 

conditions, the management systems are used to calculate the 

deterioration rate for each asset and the network as a whole. 

In an optimally funded program, the amount of improvement 

created by the capital and maintenance programs would 

offset the rate of deterioration across the network. However, 

Queensland officials were able to document that only about 

50 percent of the level of maintenance investment was 

occurring to sustain the assets over time without significant 

depreciation in the value of the state’s highway infrastructure. 

The extent of the problem was further exacerbated when 

construction prices soared between 2005 and 2008. That 

caused the future replacement value of the depreciated assets 

to increase significantly, widening the investment deficit 

the state faces in future years. Queensland officials said the 

analysis did not result in immediate increases in investment 

from Treasury officials, but it certainly “got their attention” 

that the state has a serious long-term infrastructure liability 

it needs to monitor carefully (figure 11).

The road network infrastructure asset valuation brings 

together two areas of professional practice, financial management and road network asset management. The officials said 

the resulting closer communication has strengthened links 

between financial planning and asset planning, as required by 

the state’s Financial and Performance Management Standard, 

published by the Queensland Treasury.

Figure 11. Queensland captures the long-term cost of deferred maintenance.

Value ($)

initial

asset

current

value

residual

value

Depreciation

to date

AGE RUL Time (yrs)

Total Useful Life

Decision at this point 

to defer pavement 

stabilization and 

reconstruct at a later 

date—useful life 

extended, but 

residual reduced.
32 LINKING BUDGETS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Queensland officials said the main purpose for valuing 

infrastructure assets is to generate information that will 

help them decide on the conduct of their core business. The 

department has articulated its vision for road network asset 

management as maximizing performance in a whole-of-life 

context in terms of safety, road user costs, community 

benefits, and government outlays.

Queensland officials have refined their depreciation process 

down to an individual element basis for many assets. It 

uses unit prices from its project-estimating system to value 

the replacement cost of individual assets, with variations 

captured for different regions. Both direct and 

overhead costs to replace assets are captured.

Similar depreciation models were cited in New Zealand, 

Victoria, and New South Wales. New South Wales officials 

called the product of their depreciation analysis a Capital 

Sustainability Index. It translates the needed maintenance 

investment versus the actual maintenance expenditures into 

a ratio. The index did not convince the central government 

to increase maintenance budgets, but the New South Wales 

RTA used it to redirect its resources to sustain maintenance 

conditions.

Ambitious Goals and Visions 

Drive Investment 

Although the performance management processes did not 

lead directly to consistent budget increases for highway 

preservation, the scan team found many instances of governments investing significant new sums to expand the transportation system. These investments were driven by broad 

national visions, such as creating livable cities, spurring 

economic investment, or linking regions by improving 

corridors. In short, striving for ambitious new visions 

rather than achieving narrow performance targets tended 

to motivate societies to substantially increase investment 

in their transportation networks.

All four nations the scan team visited had some form of 

major transportation investment initiative underway. Some 

were directly influenced by the economic downturn, such 

as Australia’s Nation Building Program. New Zealand’s 

government focused on investing in seven national corridors 

to create an enhanced network of Roads of National 

Significance. Great Britain recently committed GBP6.3 

billion (USD10.2 billion) to rehabilitate and expand its 

busiest highway, the M25, and it is considering a high-speed 

rail network. Sweden used revenue from an urban pricing 

cordon to finance a new USD3.7 billion outer belt around 

its capital, Stockholm. The Queensland government was 

building a comprehensive network of busways to alleviate 

congestion. In Sydney, a gleaming new freeway tunnel 

completed a key missing link in the urban freeway 

network. 

The relationship between the agencies’ performance 

management credibility and the government’s decision to 

entrust these agencies to manage massive new investments 

is unclear. It appeared to the scan team members, however, 

that the credibility earned by the transportation agencies for 

efficiency and competency had at least an indirect bearing 

on the government’s decision to invest massively in new 

transportation infrastructure.

Nation Building in Australia

Australia’s Infrastructure Act 2008 was intended to enhance 

the federal role in transportation by increasing federal coordination, planning, and financing for nationally important 

transportation projects. It created an agency called Infrastructure Australia in the national Department of Infrastructure, 

Transport, Regional Development, and Local Government. 

The primary function of Infrastructure Australia is to advise 

the minister, commonwealth, states, territories, local governments, investors, and owners of infrastructure on transportation needs, prioritization of projects, regulatory and price 

issues, options for reforms, infrastructure user needs, and 

mechanisms for infrastructure financing. In addition, it has 

authority to perform audits of the adequacy, capacity, and 

condition of the nation’s infrastructure. 

Infrastructure Australia is intended to develop a strategic 

blueprint for the commonwealth’s future infrastructure needs. 

Its enabling act calls for it to work in partnership with states, 

territories, local governments, and the private sector while it 

develops advice to the governments about infrastructure gaps 

and bottlenecks that hinder economic growth. It also is 

charged with advising the commonwealth on investment 

priorities and regulatory reforms necessary for the timely 

delivery of infrastructure projects. 

The central government also developed a concurrent 

financing program called the Nation Building Program. 

It is intended to be an AUD26.7 billion (USD21.2 billion) 

highway and rail development program for 2009 to 2014. 

It calls the program the largest land transport program in the 

nation’s history. To put that amount of investment into 

perspective, a U.S. highway and rail program of the same size 

on a per capita basis would total USD316 billion. The fiscal 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 33

year 2009 authorization under U.S. transportation legislation 

was just under USD40 billion for highways.

The government also appointed an infrastructure coordinator 

to lead an Office of Infrastructure Coordination, which will 

identify needs, advise the commonwealth on projects to 

select, and coordinate the efforts of states, territories, regions, 

and cities to develop an integrated transportation network. 

Infrastructure Australia also was tasked with conducting 

studies of the adequacy, capacity, and condition of nationally significant infrastructure. Its assignment is to anticipate 

levels of growth and the adequacy of the national network 

to accommodate it and, from its analysis, develop a national 

infrastructure priority list for the Council of Australian 

Governments (COAG) to consider. COAG is a statutorily 

created council of the prime minister, state premiers 

(governors), territorial chief ministers, and the president 

of the Australian Local Government Administration. 

The following are other duties of the coordinator:

`Evaluate the business case for new infrastructure, 

when commissioned to do so.

`Review and provide advice on measures to improve 

coordination of policy and regulatory regimes that 

facilitate infrastructure development and investment.

`Identify barriers, or disincentives, to invest in nationally 

significant infrastructure.

Infrastructure Australia will also be asked to review the 

extent to which the government can facilitate infrastructure 

investment, including improving guidelines for publicprivate partnerships, project appraisal techniques, and 

planning and approval processes.

New Zealand Roads of National 

Significance

In its Government Policy Statement, the New Zealand 

national government clearly emphasized enhanced transportation investment as a key strategy for improving the economy 

and increasing the nation’s economic competitiveness:

“The government’s priority for its investment in land 

transport is to increase economic productivity and 

growth in New Zealand. Quality land transport 

infrastructure and services are an essential part of a 

robust economy. They enable people and businesses 

to access employment and markets throughout the 

country and link them to international markets 

through the nation’s ports and airports. Investing in 

high quality infrastructure projects that support the 

efficient movement of freight and people is critical.”

The government, elected in 2008, created a new office, or 

portfolio, for infrastructure to develop a 20-year plan for the 

nation’s total public infrastructure system, including transportation, schools, prisons, hospitals, and housing. The Treasury 

established an Infrastructure Unit to carry out the government’s infrastructure goals. An Infrastructure Advisory Board, 

which includes stakeholder representatives from industry, 

local government, and the public sector, will provide independent advice to the Infrastructure Unit and the minister of 

infrastructure. It will also help coordinate the development of 

the National Infrastructure Plan and monitor progress on the 

objectives of the plan after it is released.

The government listed seven initial Roads of National 

Significance for priority in investment. Its emphasis is to focus 

investment to achieve economic growth and productivity on 

the roads: 

`Puhoi to Wellsford—State Highway 1

`Completion of the Auckland Western Ring Route—

State Highway 20/16/18

`Auckland Victoria Park bottleneck—State Highway 1

`Waikato Expressway—State Highway 1

`Tauranga Eastern Corridor—State Highway 2

`Wellington Northern Corridor (Levin to Wellington) 

—State Highway 1

`Christchurch motorway projects

Its Government Policy Statement emphasizes its intention to 

focus investment on these major corridors on the national 

network: 

“These are seven of New Zealand’s most essential 

routes that require significant development to reduce 

congestion, improve safety and support economic 

growth. The purpose of listing roads as nationally 

significant is to ensure these priority roading developments are taken fully into account when the NZTA 

develops the National Land Transport Programme. 

Planning for the future development of the land 

transport network should reflect the importance of 

these roads from a national perspective and the need to 

advance them quickly. The National Land Transport 

Fund can be used for the future development of the 

Roads of National Significance. Roads of National 

Significance will be part of the National Infrastructure 
34 LINKING BUDGETS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Plan. Further Roads of National Significance may be 

added over time.”

The government specifies that expansion and improvement 

of the state highway system should receive 33 to 34 percent 

of the total transport budget. To help increase investment 

in the state highway network, the government moved about 

NZD130 million (USD96 million) in nonhighway expenses 

from the dedicated land transport fund, which is paid for 

primarily through fuel taxes and road user charges, to the 

state’s general fund, increasing overall transportation 

investment. Therefore, the New Zealand government made 

highway investment a priority and achieved this by the 

following:

`Reprioritized other funding in the National Land 

Transport Fund

`Injected additional crown funding

`Authorized the agency to raise debt

`Encouraged exploring of alternative funding sources, 

including debt tolling

British System Expansion Plans 

Great Britain is pursuing a massive rebuilding of its most 

important highway, the M25, while also exploring the 

development of a high-speed rail network, improvements 

to conventional rail service, and the upgrade of other 

priority highway routes across the country.

The largest active project is the GBP6.2 billion (USD10.2 

billion) design-build-operate-finance widening and operation of the M25. It is one of the world’s most heavily traveled 

highways with volumes of up to 200,000 vehicles a day. It is 

a ring road around London and forms the hub of England’s 

motorway network. The majority of the contract value is in 

maintaining and operating the road over 30 years, but the 

project also includes widening nearly 100 km (60 mi) of 

the beltway. 

In August 2009, British rail operator Network Rail released 

a study recommending a GBP34 billion (USD54 billion) 

high-speed rail line from London to Scotland with branches 

to the Midlands and Northwest. It promotes the line as a 

high-speed, low-carbon solution that will promote economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social 

inclusion. 

Network Rail said the intercity service will save 300,000 tons 

of carbon emissions and 50 million hours of travel time in the 

nation. It said a detailed study concluded that a new 200 km/h 

(124 mi/h) high-speed line to the Midlands, Northwest, and 

Scotland would cut travel time to Scotland from London by 

half to just over 2 hours. The rail operator said its study 

concluded that the line will pay for itself and provide additional societal benefits, such as travel time savings, emission 

reductions, and the ability to use current intercity lines for 

local commuter traffic. 

Victorian Transport Plans

The Australian state of Victoria has embraced an ambitious 

AUD38 billion (USD35 billion) plan to reshape its urbanized areas around Melbourne by coordinating development 

in five urban and suburban hubs across the region. The plan 

also strengthens the connections among regional, rural, 

and metropolitan Victoria so all parts of the state share in 

prosperity. The Victorian Transport Plan is the government’s 

statewide action plan for expanding the reach and capacity 

of Victoria’s transport system over a 12-year period. 

Melbourne’s population was about 3.6 million people 

in 2009 and is forecast to grow to 5 million by 2030. 

Transportation officials said 1,600 people a week move 

into the city. 

Recently the city secured more than AUD3 billion (USD2.7 

billion) from the central government for transit expansion 

(regional rail link) because the state demonstrated that it 

had an ambitious land use and transportation plan in place. 

State transportation officials said they and local officials 

Victorian Transport Plan

In announcing the Victorian Transport Plan in 2008, the 

premier said the following:

“Our Government will deliver key transport projects 

over the short, medium and long term that will transform our State. . . . For the first time in the State’s 

history, the Victorian Transport Plan is fully integrated 

with future land use planning—so that these investments will help shape sustainable, resilient and livable 

communities for the future.”

The plan included the following: 

`More than AUD5.4 billion for new rolling stock 

`AUD1.9 billion to expand suburban roads

`AUD2.4 billion to expand the metro rail system

`AUD4 billion for a regional expansion

`AUD4.5 billion Metro rail tunnel

`AUD2.5 billion road tunnel

`AUD6 billion road to complete Melbourne’s 

orbital network
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 35

share a vision to reshape the urban region into one that is 

sustainable and more compact and that has distinct hubs 

that efficiently integrate business, residences, and transportation. Victorian Department of Transport officials said they 

developed a shared vision to integrate the highway, transit, 

and rail systems into a network that accommodates the 

growth of the region without creating auto-dependent 

sprawl that could reduce the region’s high quality of life. 

They said the main driver for the vision and investment 

is less a response to climate change and more a desire to 

develop a functioning transportation system to accommodate economic growth and quality of life. 

 “We can’t shape our city if we don’t have a transportation 

plan first,” said a Victoria official.

He said the government is in favor of higher density development, but realizes that such development cannot be located 

only in the Melbourne central business district. He said the 

region desires five natural clusters of development, including 

the Melbourne central business district and four suburban 

hubs. The plan calls for developing infrastructure to support 

these five hubs without further stress on the transportation 

systems. Officials know they have to plan for another 600,000 

suburban residents by 2030, as well as plan for growth in the 

central business district. “The challenge for us is to put 

transport in early ahead of the growth.” 

The Melbourne region already has one of the most integrated 

and diverse transportation networks in the world. It has more 

than 240 km (144 mi) of trams, extensive rail passenger 

service, and active cycling and walking programs and plans 

to expand those services. Officials recently announced the 

biggest rail project since the 19th century, which will include 

expansion of two new tracks to provide rail passenger service 

in the suburbs. 

The state and Department of Transport also developed 

Freight Futures: Victorian Freight Network Strategy, which 

plans for an ambitious expansion of the freight network to 

accommodate growth in water, shipping, rail, and highway 

freight traffic. The plan says containerized shipments from 

its port are expected to grow from 2 million containers in 

2009 to 8 million by 2036. It says that highway freightkilometers of travel are expected to increase 70 percent and 

the number of trucks on the roads by 60 percent. The large 

majority of freight now moves by truck, but the freight plan 

calls for significant efforts to expand rail service. The plan 

also calls for 20 distinct freight strategies, including the 

following:

`Identify a freight network.

`Develop freight activity centers.

`Protect future corridors.

`Plan for freight growth.

`Improve the “last kilometer.”

`Invest in both roads and rail.

`Manage where trucks travel on the network.

`Improve freight data collection.

Demonstrating Return on Investment: 

Value for Money

“Value for money” was a common theme the scan team heard 

during its study. The agencies continuously used benefit-cost 

analyses to evaluate projects and communicate their benefits 

to the public, stakeholders, and government. The use of 

benefit-cost analysis appeared to occur at both the project 

level to evaluate individual projects and the program level to 

consider overall investment levels. Reliance on benefit-cost 

analysis and the value-for-money concept appeared to be 

ingrained in the agencies, ministries, parliaments, and local 

government project sponsors. The smallest nation visited, 

New Zealand, had a 956-page Economic Evaluation Manual 

for highway projects. 

British Benefit-Cost and Risk Analysis

The British Treasury published and updated a Green Book: 

Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government, which 

requires five stages of evaluation of benefits and costs, not 

only for the selection of individual projects but also for 

the funding of government programs.

As the document states, “The purpose of the Green Book is 

to ensure that no policy, programme or project is adopted 

without first having the answer to these questions:

`Are there better ways to achieve this objective?

`Are there better uses for these resources?”

The Green Book describes the types of analysis that need to 

occur during policy or program development, when new or 

replacement capital projects are considered, when assets are 

considered for disposal, when new regulations are considered, 

and when major procurement decisions are made. 

The British Department for Transport has developed a comprehensive approach to evaluating projects and documenting their 

value for money based on the underlying government approach 

described in the Green Book. The principal aim is to ensure that 

value for money is achieved and that the department’s chief 
36 LINKING BUDGETS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

accounting officer can document projects’ justification when 

required by Parliament. Department for Transport officials said 

they use their benefit-cost program to advise ministers on the 

expected impacts of proposals, support planning staff decisions, 

and explain to the public about the benefits and impacts of 

projects and programs. 

The Department for Transport evaluates projects on a 

cost-benefit basis rather than a cost-effectiveness basis. The 

cost-benefit process quantifies in monetary terms as many 

of the costs and benefits of a proposal as possible, including 

items for which the market does not provide prices. These 

include the cost of a ton of carbon emissions or the value of 

time. In a cost-effectiveness evaluation, an analysis includes 

only the costs of alternative ways to provide the project or 

service. The value of many externalities is not included.

The British transport benefit-cost system compares projects 

or programs to a no-build or no-action scenario (figure 12). 

Its analysis assumes that in an increasingly populated world 

that congestion and its associated costs of delay, emissions, 

and crashes would increase in the no-build case. Therefore, 

the costs and benefits of a project are compared not just to 

the current base case of conditions, but also to a future 

no-build case in which congestion and its impacts are 

higher. The British analysis seeks to evaluate if net social 

welfare would be greater with the investment than without 

it. The Department for Transport evaluates projects on a 

60-year horizon with a 3.5 percent discount rate. 

Figure 12. A project’s congestion benefits

are compared to a no-build scenario.

Among the values that are monetized when evaluating 

projects are risk of death and injury, noise, carbon emissions, 

physical fitness of residents if they increase their amount of 

walking, travel time savings, operating costs of the facility, 

private sector impacts, and the costs to government. Other 

factors for which a qualitative value is applied include the 

effects of visual intrusion on a community, aquatic impacts, 

social inclusion, biodiversity, and effects on historical facilities 

or geographic context. With the other nonmonetized values, 

Department for Transport officials create an adjusted benefitcost ratio, which is not as economically robust but captures a 

wider array of impacts and considerations.

Department for Transport officials use the findings to make 

value-for-money reports that can assess a project or program 

by the following:

`Economic benefit-cost ratio

`Adjusted benefit-cost ratio, which includes assumptions 

about the value of the intangible costs and benefits

`A description of nonmonetized impacts, such as the 

quality of effects on a community

`A description of how sensitive the benefit-cost analysis is 

to intangible benefits, such as the project’s effect on the 

community’s landscape

`A final value-for-money recommendation

Projects are grouped by their relative merits, with projects 

with benefit-cost ratios of 1.0 or less rated as poor, above 

2 as high, and above 4 as very high. With such rankings, 

officials can document that up to 95 percent of projects the 

department selected were in the high or very high value-formoney category.

Other Benefit-Cost Applications

Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads 

officials demonstrated how they use benefit-cost rankings 

to prioritize arrays of strategies. They rank ordered a large 

number of safety countermeasures by their benefit-cost ratios. 

Strategies as diverse as increased speed enforcement, increased 

driver education, and engineering improvements were 

evaluated based on international studies of their effectiveness. 

A Pareto analysis was conducted to determine which small 

percentage of roadway conditions create a disproportionate 

percentage of crashes. From those two analyses, the most 

effective strategies to address the crashes were estimated by 

rank order of cost-effectiveness. The most cost-effective was 

an increase in police presence combined with speed cameras, 

which produced a 65:1 benefit-cost ratio. 

NZTA conducted a periodic baseline review of the benefits of 

enforcement services that could lead to increased investment. 

An additional 337,000 road-policing hours were added when 

the benefit-cost analysis showed it would provide an 8:1 

return (with no diminishing returns.) The benefit-cost ratio 

Benefits of 

investment

Year

Monetised lost time
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 37

of targeted onroad enforcement, speed cameras, and safety 

advertising has shown benefits of up to 28:1.

Officials in these agencies said they use such analyses to 

explain their decisions to the public, media, and legislators. 

“We get tremendous scrutiny on what we are investing in. 

The dollar we spent could be spent on some other public 

good. So we find ourselves being more thorough on analyzing 

and explaining how we spend that dollar,” said a Queensland 

official. 

Exceptions to Benefit Costs

Despite the widespread use of benefit-cost analysis, the 

benefit-cost ratio was often not the only criterion used in 

project selection. Officials said policy considerations, social 

objectives, and environmental considerations often were key 

factors in decisionmaking. For instance, New Zealand officials 

said that if their passenger rail investments were made solely 

on benefit-cost ratios, the level of passenger rail spending 

might be reduced. However, society expects an adequate level 

of transit service, which the government desires to meet. In 

addition, the seven Roads of National Significance were not 

selected as a result of a benefit-cost analysis, but as a result of a 

policy-driven initiative to improve the economy and make the 

country more competitive. The New Zealand Investment and 

Revenue Strategy assigns a profile to every transport product, 

giving a high, medium, or low rating for each of the three 

criteria: strategic fit, effectiveness, and efficiency.

The amount to be spent on the massive Nation Building 

Program in Australia was not calibrated based on an economic analysis of benefits and costs. However, the benefitcost ratios of individual projects will be a factor in selecting 

and ranking the projects proposed for funding.

Although the officials interviewed were adherents of benefitcost analysis for projects, all acknowledged that it may not 

capture all considerations of a project and that their governments often considered noneconomic factors in their final 

decisions.

Risk Management

The concept of risk appeared to be emerging rapidly among 

the agencies that sought to demonstrate the financial prudence of their actions. By managing risk, they could more 

intelligently invest scarce resources among many competing 

investment needs. 

For example, the concept of risk management permeated the 

New South Wales RTA. Risk was discussed in virtually every 

decision area of the organization, from how it tests and 

licenses young, at-risk drivers to how it selects locations 

for guardrails, performs maintenance on steep slopes, 

and measures the risks of reusing treated timber pilings. 

A perusal of the agency’s financial statements, annual 

reports, and oversight documents revealed that managing 

risks and making rational tradeoffs between the degree 

of risk and the subsequent level of investment were 

widespread across many disciplines.

The New South Wales Total Asset Management Manual

describes risk management as a systematic process to identify 

risks that may impact the organization’s objectives, analyze 

their consequences, and develop ongoing measures to treat 

them. It says risk management is essential at any stage of the 

asset life cycle when a significant decision must be made. The 

risks associated with the decision and their implications should 

be weighed with other factors when determining a course of 

action. It requires that risk management be formally applied 

throughout the total asset management process when setting 

strategic directions, developing or evaluating projects and 

programs, and entering into contracts with the private sector.

The New South Wales RTA annual report acknowledged 

that it faces considerable challenges and risks in managing 

its large bridge and road networks. The number and cost 

of high-volume, aging pavements with undetermined 

remaining service lives was one form of risk mentioned in 

the report. A key challenge in managing these pavements 

is to accurately forecast the structural conditions and 

their subsequent remaining useful life. To reduce risk, the 

department captures the results of research projects to more 

accurately predict the structural integrity of the pavement 

and better identify which high-volume pavements are 

at high risk of eventual failure. Those pavements are 

scheduled for rehabilitation or replacement.

On lower volume pavements, another aspect of risk management and pavement decisionmaking was to give priority 

treatment to weaker and more water-sensitive rural granular 

pavements over urban arterial asphalt roads, which are more 

resilient to rainfall. The urban arterial roads are typically lower 

speed roads and represent less risk to road safety caused by 

surface roughness than the higher speed rural routes. The 

risk-mitigation approach has resulted in acceptable levels 

of service on both the rural and urban network and reduced 

risk on the crash-prone, higher speed rural routes. 

The department’s infrastructure maintenance program 

establishes priorities on a risk basis to protect assets and 
38 LINKING BUDGETS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

safeguard motorists. A strategic risk-based approach is taken 

to maintenance to determine minimum levels of service and 

ensure consistent requirements for identifying and rectifying 

defects. The bridge management approach prioritizes 

investments by historical failure rates for specific elements of 

bridges based on bridge age and bridge design (figure 13). The 

department realized that pre-1948 bridges lack sufficient live 

load safety factors, so it prioritized those bridges for corrective 

treatment. Likewise, it identified a list of high-risk slopes on 

the state network for inspection and treatment. 

In driver licensing and vehicle inspection, the consideration 

of risk was highly evident. A Novice Driver Pilot Program was 

begun as an AUD10 million education program to reduce the 

number of young driver deaths on state roads. The trial was 

a joint effort by RTA, the Australian and Victorian governments, and the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries. 

The training will provide young, provisional drivers with an 

understanding of their limitations and how they can reduce 

the risks they face on the road.

A vehicle selection matrix is used as a risk-based procedure 

for identifying and inspecting heavy vehicles. It improves 

the intercept rate of high-risk vehicles through a screening 

process to identify vehicles with historically poor compliance 

rates. It has been deployed at checking stations to reduce the 

intercepts of low-risk vehicles and to focus inspection 

activities on higher risk vehicles and operators.

In 2006, the department began an environmental risk 

assessment of the reuse of treated bridge timbers. The 

timbers had not been reused because of concerns about 

surface treatment chemicals. Depending on the outcome 

of the risk assessment, the department will conduct a trial 

timber reuse program. Also, in the environmental area 

it adopted a risk assessment process for identifying 

construction projects with a propensity for significant 

sedimentation runoff. 

Figure 13. Queensland officials track the overall risk to their bridge inventory as an ongoing

metric in their reporting processes.

4500000

4000000

3500000

3000000

2500000

2000000

1500000

1000000

500000

0

01-May-04

30-Jun-04

29-Aug-04

28-Oct-04

27-Dec-04

25-Feb-05

26-Apr-05

25-Jun-05

24-Aug-05

23-Oct-05

22-Dec-05

20-Feb-06

21-Apr-06

20-Jun-06

19-Aug-06

18-Oct-06

17-Dec-06

15-Feb-07

16-Apr-07

15-Jun-07

14-Aug-07

13-Oct-07

12-Dec-07

10-Feb-08

10-Apr-08

09-Jun-08

08-Aug-08

07-Oct-08

06-Dec-08

04-Feb-09

05-Apr-09

04-Jun-09

4.5

4.0

3.5

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0

BRIDGES: Risk Index & Total Risk Trends

Risk Index

Risk

n Risk Index ▲ Total Risk

n

n

n

n n n

n n

n

n n n n

▲ ▲ ▲ ▲

▲

▲ ▲

▲

▲

▲

▲ ▲

▲
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 39

Noticeable throughout the scanning study were 

the large amounts of performance data the 

agencies produced. Their annual reports, service 

agreements with the central government, and 

midyear progress reports all were voluminous in the depth, 

scope, and scale of their performance reporting.

It was apparent that legislative and budget officials could 

evaluate the agencies’ performance across a wide range of 

activities. They could produce results showing their accomplishments on highway asset conditions, highway and transit 

performance, environmental impacts, operating efficiencies, 

and public satisfaction with their agencies. The performance 

information was highly detailed and tended to track results 

over time (figure 14). It was clear the agencies had fully 

embraced performance management as the framework 

for running their organizations.

Reporting Documents Were Professionally 

Produced

The use of professionally produced reports for public 

information was common. The agencies produced annual 

reports, strategic plans, strategy reports, and other documents 

printed on magazine-grade paper stock, with full-color 

photography and advertising-quality graphics. While such 

high-cost reports may be criticized in the United States, 

they were commonly accepted in the countries the scan team 

visited as an appropriate means for conveying complex and 

important information to the public. All of the agencies 

produced a significant number of such publications each year. 

One agency staff member said the agency uses the reports as 

a recruiting tool with young professional job candidates. The 

high quality of the publications, which depict the importance 

Figure 14. Highway fatalities in Victoria have fallen significantly.

1100

1000

900

800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

197019721974197619781980198219841986198819901992199419961998200020022004

Annual Road Fatalities in Victoria, 1970-2004

Chapter 4

Transparency, Accountability,

and Emerging Issues
40 TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EMERGING ISSUES

of the agency’s work, illustrates the personal and professional 

rewards that can come from working for the organization, 

the staff member said. 

Performance Reviews

Reviews of the agencies’ performance were common. These 

reviews were often required through statute or regulation, 

such as the quarterly progress reports SRA provides to central 

government budget officials in Sweden. The Results and 

Service Plans in New South Wales and the Statements of 

Intent in New Zealand also were followed with regular 

progress reports to central officials throughout the year. 

Agency officials said that the updates keep the agency focused 

on results, but that they also have other important benefits. 

They said regular reporting to central agencies tends to 

increase the central officials’ understanding of the issues 

confronting the agency. 

“We rely on dialogue, dialogue, dialogue,” said an SRA official 

in explaining the strategy for communicating needs, results, 

and constraints to central budget officials. SRA officials meet 

with budget officials monthly. Formal quarterly reports are 

required on their progress toward the annual operational plan. 

However, the reporting sessions tend to involve more informal dialogue than formal review of detailed performance 

metrics, SRA officials said. They said they and their agency 

benefit from the continuous interaction with budget officials 

because it enhances the central government’s understanding 

of the agency’s needs and what it realistically can accomplish 

within the constraints it faces. Instead of penalties for failing 

to meet a specific target, the discussion usually focuses on 

factors that influenced actual performance. 

A New Zealand transportation official made similar observations about the importance of regular reporting to ministry 

officials. “Many of these communications are formal and 

many are informal. In reality, organizations are people. 

Much of this is how people interact. Our interaction is heavily 

dependent upon the trust and dialogue between people. It 

takes trust for government to say, ‘We’ll leave these decisions 

up to you.’ Letting agencies have large budgets and influence 

does require a high level of trust in making these decisions.”

The agencies commonly hold regular internal update 

meetings in which agency managers report on progress 

on agency goals.

SRA uses a Balanced Scorecard tracking process at all levels 

of the organization. Each manager has his or her unit’s own 

Balanced Scorecard report that feeds into the organizational 

scorecard. Regular updates on progress are held with the 

senior staff, often monthly. All major aspects of the agency’s 

Balanced Scorecard reporting are also tracked on the agency 

intranet, which includes voluminous reports on agency 

performance. SRA also has invested in intense leadership 

training with small groups of managers to ensure they 

understand the performance management framework 

of the organization.

In all of the agencies visited, performance audits were common and were usually required by law. The countries or states 

had Treasury officials or auditors general charged with the 

performance audit function. The auditors published reports 

and recommendations, which were incorporated into the 

management priorities for subsequent years.

Incentive-Based Management

“Do It With People, Not To Them”

“Do it with people, not to them” was both a direct quote 

and a common sentiment heard from transportation officials 

during the scan. From Sweden to New Zealand, transportation officials advised that carrots versus sticks, incentives 

versus penalties, and dialogue versus dictates were preferred 

in the intergovernmental management of performance. 

Experienced agency managers urged cooperation when the 

central government sets measures for transportation agencies 

to achieve or transportation agencies set targets for local 

agencies. They universally advised that collaborative processes 

to assess strategies and set goals were preferable to performance mandates. The scan team found few cases in which one 

level of government penalized another for poor performance. 

The performance measures found were benchmarks for 

continuous improvement and dialogue, rather than milestones for penalty.

British Cooperative Performance Process

As mentioned previously, the British performance management process has evolved from a prescriptive process to 

a cooperative and collaborative one. The national performance management process began in 1998 with a long 

list of performance measures that the central agencies, 

regional governments, and local governments were 

required to report on. Web sites and news reports revealed 

that regional and local governments had significant difficulty with the time and expense the reporting requirements 

involved. The number of required measures steadily 

declined, culminating in 2007 in a significant change in 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 41

the government’s approach. In that 2007 update, four key 

changes were made:

`Clear national priorities were set. A new set of corporate 

Public Service Agreements that reflect genuine choices 

about priorities were adopted.

`Accountability for delivery was strengthened. Published 

Delivery Agreements clearly set out the level of ambition, 

strategy for delivery, and role of all stakeholders.

`Responsiveness in public services was incentivized. 

Public Service Agreements underpinned by a small 

basket of indicators were adopted; targets were used 

only where appropriate.

`Communities and citizens were empowered.

`More performance data were provided to citizens and 

local governments to improve their decisionmaking.

Department for Transport officials said that the decade 

of trial and error in performance management taught the 

government that performance measures are a key component of improving government services, but they are best 

used in a collaborative, cooperative process. Performance 

measures work best when departments and agencies being 

measured have a sense of ownership of the measures and 

believe they reflect a shared priority. 

“We also work with them to set the target, because we 

want them to own it,” said a Department for Transport 

official who works with local governments to reduce 

congestion in their communities. “We very much went 

through a process to try to get them to own it. . . . One of 

the benefits is they now say, ‘We much better understand 

our network and we much better understand how we can 

manage it.’ . . . The big lesson is this has to be worked out 

over a number of years. There is a lot of learning on both 

sides. The fact that we have persuaded the local authorities 

to do this illustrates that we came up with evidence to 

overcome their skepticism. . . . The locals said the money 

was good but the real value was, ‘we felt important, we got 

to interact with the Df T, which we don’t normally get to 

do. You shined a light on us and we got to interact on 

strategies with the Df T to improve.’’’

The British experience demonstrated a repeated pattern of 

officials setting several narrow measures as surrogates for 

achieving a larger social goal. Over time, they lessened reliance 

on many measures of output for fewer measures of outcome. 

“Be absolutely ruthless about what you measure, how you 

measure, and what you mean,” advised one British veteran 

of the performance measure evolution.

The British also advised that performance measures 

combined with financial incentives and penalties are only 

a very small part of improving local or regional government 

performance. They said they use a broad range of other 

strategies to convince regional and local governments to 

want to improve their performance, rather than forcing 

them to improve their performance. These strategies 

include the following:

`Central government officials providing peer data to 

illustrate to local governments how their performance 

may lag behind their peers on important public 

services or asset conditions

`Specific training to enhance existing teams in local 

authorities and improve, in particular, specialist skills

`Enlisting of local government officials in peer exchange 

groups so they learn and benchmark from one another

`Active management against trajectory, which is the joint 

tracking of performance compared to a target to anticipate and correct performance before a goal is missed 

(figure 15, see next page)

`Publicity and praise of high performers

`Giving agencies greater autonomy to achieve outcomes

The Department for Transport does not use the measures 

and targets in a punitive fashion to demand performance 

from local government, officials said. “Targets are not the 

only lever. We’ve moved away from looking only at measures 

(of whether local government accomplished desired results). 

We’ve expanded our evaluation to look at overall, ‘What did 

it do? What does it want for itself ? Is it achieving those 

goals?’ The measures form the basis for the discussion, but 

are not the only focus of the discussion.” 

“You’d better be very clear about what you want to do and 

what you want to get. Also don’t do it to people; do it with 

people.”

Officials said the lesson from their experience is that improving performance of local governments involves constructive 

engagement in the form of workshops, benchmarking, 

newsletters, peer reviews, and consulting assistance. The 

semiannual review of budgets and performance is only one 

part of the process to set and achieve goals. “You cannot do it 

only in the context of a spending review,” one said. “Understand your delivery method. This is absolutely key.”

“Have indicators but not targets. Think hard at the beginning 

to have broad indicators and categories but not targets. You 

want to be focused without having specific targets.”
42 TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EMERGING ISSUES

The United States and British transportation governance 

structures have significant parallels. In both countries, the 

central government works with a large number of regional 

and local partners to carry out government transport policies. 

Although HA provides more direct management of central 

roads than does FHWA, the British agency still relies on 

regional and local authorities to manage 97 percent of the 

country’s road-miles. HA manages 2 percent of the network, 

but that includes high-volume routes that carry 31 percent of 

all British motorway traffic. The remaining 69 percent is 

under local jurisdiction.

When the government sets goals to reduce crashes, reduce 

emissions from transportation, or get best value for the 

money from transportation investment, it must rely on 

the performance of the regional and local governments that 

control most of the highway network. The central government in England works with 34 counties, 238 regional 

district governments, 83 unified districts that include both 

counties and cities, 33 London boroughs, the seven largest 

cities (which have significant autonomy), and six integrated 

transport authorities. In short, central government officials 

must work through a wide array of broadly distributed and 

individualist local, regional, county, and city agencies to 

achieve national performance goals, such as congestion 

reduction.

“The delivery of this becomes quite a bit interesting because 

we don’t have control over this,” said a Department for 

Transport congestion official. “It is a matter of ‘what are 

our levers to deal with this?’”

Despite the complexities of the governance structure, the 

Department for Transport has engaged in performance 

improvement in a broad number of highly complex, highly 

distributed areas, such as congestion reduction in the 10 

largest urban areas. Because the Department for Transport 

and HA do not control the cities’ routes, traffic signals, transit 

operators, or rail operators, their approach has been one of 

education, consensus, and incentives. One of the few programs the scan team found that actually included financial 

incentives or penalties was the English urban congestion 

program. This program sets goals for modest reductions in 

congestion levels in urban areas. Despite the modest level of 

congestion reduction sought, the result would be a significant 

improvement in the growth rate of congestion, which had 

been steadily increasing for a number of years.

The program provides GBP60 million (USD96 million) in 

supplementary funding over 4 years for projects, operational 

improvements, and other strategies in the 10 urban areas. 

Payments to the cities are based on their performance and 

are staggered to incentivize them to exceed their agreed-on 

Figure 15. Tracking trajectory against target is a British strategy to achieve performance.

Policy Delivery: Trajectories
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 43

targets. If an area fails to achieve its target, the Department 

for Transport makes a qualitative decision on how the area 

has been performing, with up to 25 percent of its original 

allocated funding available. If the Department for Transport 

decides that the local government is not making a sufficient 

effort to meets its congestion target, no reward funding is 

provided. To date, no area has lost all funding, but two areas 

were deemed as making insufficient progress. They were 

subject to increased assessment to improve their strategies 

and received 25 percent funding that year.

New Zealand Local Government 

Engagement Strategies

New Zealand also has a negotiated target-setting process in 

which it works with local governments to set transportation 

performance expectations. Although a small country of 4 

million people, it works with 85 local councils to set targets. 

The New Zealand structure has some parallels to the United 

States in that it has regional councils that function somewhat 

like metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in collaborating with the central government to select projects. In fact, 

NZTA officials said that the agency proposes few projects 

that do not come from regional and local officials. NZTA’s 

own state highway projects must be included for funding 

consideration in regional programs. In project selection, much 

of the emphasis flows upward from local officials to the 

central government. In two other important ways, the emphasis flows downward from the central government to regional 

and local officials. Local officials are required to develop 

Long-Term Council Community Plans (LTCCP), asset 

management plans, and financial management plans, which 

NZTA must audit and approve. NZTA is interested in two 

components of the LTCCPs, the asset management plan and 

ensuring that the community was consulted on projects for 

which financial assistance is requested. The effect of these 

processes is local input on project selection and programmatic 

or statutory requirements for local officials to demonstrate 

basic competency in areas such as asset management, local 

planning, and long-term financial management. 

Regional land transport strategies must take account of local 

priorities while also demonstrating that national objectives 

have been considered. In addition to land transport strategies, 

local governments must adopt a community plan and an asset 

management plan. The asset management plan is a derivative 

of national financial sustainability requirements that local 

governments must demonstrate. The long-term sustainability 

of NZTA-owned assets is considered one component of the 

long-term fiscal solvency of the local government. The asset 

management plan includes targets for different levels of 

service for different types of assets. The necessary levels of 

investments needed to achieve those targets also must be 

identified. The asset management plans and their accompanying fiscal plans are subject to review by the Office of the 

Auditor General. 

When asset management plans were first required in 1996, 

many communities hired consultants to develop their plans. 

NZTA officials said some viewed the plans as stand-alone 

requirements necessary to satisfy the central government. 

Over time, continuing consultation among NZTA officials, 

the auditor general, and local officials led the local officials 

to understand that asset management is an ongoing approach 

of implementing good practices, not a stand-alone report or 

information system. Although NZTA sets performance 

expectations, the agency does not audit local governments 

or their LTCCPs. Asset management now is widely accepted 

by the local governments because the nation has developed a 

wide cohort of local officials with a strong understanding of 

asset management principles and strategies. 

The central government through NZTA has supported the 

local asset management evolution by providing data through 

the national Road Asset Management System (RAMS.) 

RAMS includes not only an inventory of all pavements, but 

also a history of all their treatments and a forecast of their 

deterioration, section by section. “You can actually tell in 

front of every house in New Zealand how many potholes 

they have and how many cracks,” said one official. 

Local and regional governments are also required to develop 

their own targets for crash reduction, transit operations, and 

walking and cycling goals. NZTA officials called the safety 

goals “tremendously useful” in encouraging local governments 

to focus on crash-reduction efforts over the long term. 

Although there are no national targets for transit use, regional 

targets are set that include factors such as total overall patronage, percent of income from the fare box, passenger-kilometers traveled, and service provision to the elderly.

Queensland Roads Alliances

The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads 

took coordination with local governments to a new level by 

leading the formation of regional Roads Alliances. These 

alliances are formal, collaborative groups of local governments 

that form asset management and safety management plans for 

the entire network of roads in their regions. These alliances 

and their networks cut across local boundaries and include all 
44 TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EMERGING ISSUES

local and state routes in a region. To date, 32,000 km 

(19,883 mi) of local and state routes have been brought under 

the jurisdiction of Local Roads of Regional Significance.

The department proposed Roads Alliances as a regional and 

collaborative approach to provide seamless decisionmaking 

across the state on local, primarily rural, roads. Because the 

public expects consistent conditions across the entire network, the alliances offered a way to pool resources, knowledge, and decisionmaking for more consistent roadway 

performance across the regions.

Through Roads Alliances, members develop an asset 

management and a safety management plan for the road 

network in their region. A Roads Alliance board oversees 

the overall process, while Regional Roads Groups select 

projects and make local decisions. Each Regional Roads 

Group is supported by a technical committee of experts 

from the Department of Main Roads and Transport 

and local engineering experts. 

Queensland officials said the Roads Alliances have led to 

regional approaches to transport planning and road works 

delivery, increased local government influence on state 

decisionmaking, and increased the availability of technical 

expertise to local governments.

Money is available for alliances to improve their capabilities 

in five performance areas: 

`Operational effectiveness

`Program development 

`Road safety 

`Asset management

`Joint purchasing and resource-sharing agreements

A Transport Infrastructure Development Scheme provides 

funding to local governments of about AUD63 million 

(USD46 million) annually. To access funds, alliances must 

demonstrate road stewardship capability and that most of 

the money will be managed through the Regional Roads 

Groups and their cooperative prioritization process.

The Roads Alliances are pursuing three new capacitybuilding products. One is called NetRisk, interactive 

software that allows the user to identify high-risk areas 

of the local road network and evaluate countermeasures. 

The alliances are also developing a statewide approach to 

asset management and road safety, including the use of 

the NetRisk tool. 

Swedish Local Cooperation 

The Swedish model illustrates that an institutional culture 

of consensus can be used to cascade broad national goals 

into local performance. Two hundred and ninety Swedish 

municipalities govern all cities, towns, and undeveloped areas 

between the towns. No counties or unincorporated areas 

exist in Sweden. Using outreach, promotion of best practices, 

benchmarking, small grants to encourage behavior, and 

continuous dialogue, SRA has extended national government 

objectives into the practices, processes, and projects of the 

local municipalities. SRA’s ability to direct municipal agencies 

is nonexistent, yet the Ministry of Transport and Parliament 

expect SRA to use persuasion, education, and benchmarking 

between municipalities to instill central government policies 

into local governmental actions. SRA officials acknowledged 

that local performance is not uniform, but they reported 

continuous improvement among local governments, 

despite a lack of control over them.

“It is a very cooperative process,” said a Swedish official 

in describing SRA interaction with local governments. 

“It doesn’t have to be. We could use our power to be road 

builders, but we don’t do that. We think we reach our 

goals much better if we cooperate.”

SRA’s example illustrates the success of a transport agency 

reaching beyond its normal stakeholders to create alliances in 

other sectors to address cross-cutting issues such as vehicular 

safety and emission reduction. It regularly collaborates with 

automobile manufacturers on vehicle emission reduction 

and safety improvement. It also works with trucking firms to 

help them identify ways to increase vehicle efficiency, reduce 

emissions, and earn accreditation as “green” businesses. Such 

accreditation can be an important marketing tool in environmentally conscious Sweden. It has worked with automotive 

manufacturers to adopt advanced skid-protection technology 

(electronic stability program) in cars, which is estimated to 

reduce the risk of fatalities by 15 percent. SRA campaigns on 

behalf of vehicular safety and regularly works with the media 

to promote vehicular safety as an important automotive feature. 

As a result, it is difficult to sell an automobile with less than a 

five-star safety rating to the informed public, SRA officials said.

Cooperative Goal, Target Setting

It was common in almost every agency visited to find a 

cooperative forum through which the central government 

and transportation stakeholders collaborate to establish 

transportation goals and targets.
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 45

In England, local authorities and development agencies advise 

the Department for Transport on goals, targets, projects, and 

priorities. In New Zealand, regional councils play a similar 

role. New Zealand also has a National Road Safety Council 

and an Asset Management Steering Committee that influence 

government policies in those areas. In Australia, the Council 

of Australian Governments represents state and local governments in ongoing consultation with the central commonwealth government. In each state, regional councils work with 

the state governments. Sweden and other European nations 

work with the European Union and the Organisation for 

Economic Cooperation and Development to set common 

goals in areas such as automobile safety, emissions, and 

benchmarking. 

The Swedish experience also demonstrates the influence of 

benchmarking with other transport agencies to identify best 

practices. SRA has regular benchmarking efforts with Poland, 

Lithuania, Latvia, and the Nordic Association, which includes 

Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, and the Minnesota DOT.

One of the most continuous transportation benchmarking 

and peer review processes is that run by Austroads, the 

association of road authorities in Australia and New Zealand. 

Since 1993, it has coordinated the publication of National 

Performance Indicators for New Zealand, as well as the states 

and territories in Australia.

Current measures include several categories of crash data 

and costs, pavement smoothness, a general measure of the 

benefit-cost ratios of projects, travel speeds, congestion, and 

a user satisfaction index. Under development are measures 

for the following:

`Greenhouse gas emissions

`Citizens’ exposure to noise

`The effectiveness of regulatory strategies, such as size and 

weight enforcement, speed limits, hours of service, and 

vehicle roadworthiness standards

`The efficiency of transactions, such as vehicle registration 

and licensing

The publication of performance information enables the 

eight state and territorial transportation agencies in Australia and the national authority in New Zealand to benchmark 

themselves at both a national and international level. The 

voluntary effort helps the authorities improve their effectiveness and efficiency as part of the overall Austroads goal to 

identify and implement international best practice in the 

management of roads. 

Austroads officials reported that the effort began in an era 

when the Australian and New Zealand governments were 

focused on improving corporate governance. The agencies 

involved decided they should adopt common performance 

metrics and benchmark their performance before the central 

government mandated it. They believe that the widespread 

availability of such robust data may also have played a role 

in the Australian central government not establishing its 

own set of performance measures for states and territories. 

Performance Management Takes Time 

and Resources 

The experience of the international agencies was that 

performance management is a very effective way to demonstrate results and accountability, but agency officials also 

warned that it can take many years. The conditions on large 

systems such as transportation networks do not change 

quickly, but only after years of sustained efforts. Gathering 

accurate data, achieving consensus on goals with other 

Outcomes Relate to the 

Public in Personal Terms

The transportation agencies the scan team visited all 

were impressive in the depth and breadth of technical 

performance data they presented. At the same time, 

they consolidated the highly technical data into 

categories of performance that were understandable 

and relevant to the public. Rather than extensive 

technical and financial data, public reporting focused 

more on outcomes of relevance and clarity to the 

typical user. 

“We make the good journey possible” is the Swedish 

Road Administration’s motto. Its entire budget is 

categorized in four broad areas: “Capture customer 

needs, improve transport conditions, offer travel 

opportunities, and provide support during the journey.” 

The British Highways Agency spoke of three overriding 

objectives: “Safe Roads, reliable journeys, and informed 

travelers.” 

The Victoria Department of Transport’s annual report 

has broad goals for environmental sustainability with 

calculations of energy consumption and greenhouse 

gas emissions down to the number of reams of paper 

the department uses.

It appeared that the departments made consistent 

efforts to translate their goals and strategies into 

meaningful examples relevant to the public.
46 TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EMERGING ISSUES

partners, and constructing projects that actually improve 

conditions can take a decade or more. 

Many noted that developing successful performance management systems is a long-term, iterative process that requires a 

commitment of funding and staff resources. The measures and 

targets evolve over time to meet changing fiscal and policy 

needs. While short-term, quickly implemented dashboards 

are helpful tools, the ultimate benefit of performance management is the continuous improvement of transportation 

programs to reach long-term societal goals.

“Evolution is my favorite word,” said a New South Wales 

official. “It’s about biting off what you can chew.”

The British case study illustrates that successful transportation 

performance management systems require time, consensus, and 

clarity, said one British official. “You can’t invent this kind of 

scheme overnight. It has taken us 10 years.” The British spent 

4 years developing their reliability measure, and they already 

plan to revise it to be more understandable to the public.

Outcomes are Difficult to Measure

Important outcomes that are difficult to measure in the 

United States were equally elusive in the agencies studied. 

Such measures as transportation’s effect on the economy, 

travel time reliability, and transportation’s effect on the 

environment were not easily captured by the international 

agencies. All of the agencies expressed a desire for continued 

evaluation of ways to measure transportation’s effects in 

these areas, particularly on the economy.

“Our lips are not necessarily connected to our checkbooks,” 

said one official, who meant that despite a desire to fund 

broad outcomes such as economic development they were 

still limited to traditional funding categories. “The money 

pots still influence decisions. We don’t fund quality of life; 

we fund transport.”

A Swedish official said they struggle for and have never settled 

on a good metric for measuring mobility. “For a long time it 

has been hard to set a target for mobility. What is it really? 

Reliability? Travel time? What is it?” he asked.

A British official who works with hundreds of local governments said the more they parse measures such as “sound 

maintenance” or “accessibility” or “air quality,” the harder it 

is for them to define good performance. Therefore, they use 

performance metrics as one, but not the only, indicator of 

performance. 

Short-Term Results Can Be Overemphasized

All of the agencies support performance management, but 

they also spoke of a tendency for elected officials to emphasize 

short-term accomplishments over long-term trends. Several 

agency officials cautioned that while frequent budget reporting of results achieved short-term transparency, they feared 

that emphasis on “bean counting” skewed performance 

toward easily measured, short-term accomplishments. They 

advised that a better system was one that tracked accomplishment on long-term goals, which may be more ambiguous to 

measure but more important overall. Important issues such 

as the public’s satisfaction with the journey, transportation’s 

support of economic development, and transportation’s link 

to environmental sustainability may be vitally important but 

difficult to measure in monthly increments. 

One senior transportation official had worked in the 

national auditor’s office, where he was involved for many 

years in measuring agency performance. As an auditor he 

was an advocate for strict measurement, but now as an 

agency executive he sees how strict focus on achieving 

specific targets can divert an agency’s focus from more 

important but difficult-to-measure objectives.

“One of the dangers of performance management . . . for people 

like me in my former role at the auditor’s was that performance 

management was an accountability tool. What it has generated 

is a dislocation between what is reported and what organizations actually use to manage performance. Focusing on accountability as a way to think about performance management forces 

us to focus on the things that are easily measured and which can 

be measured over a shorter time period. That has forced us to 

measure on short-term things we can count. Also, it leads to risk 

aversion to the type of targets you set. Accountability is not as 

helpful as it could be to drive performance. Speaking from my 

old perspective, I have strong feeling for the need for accountability. In a parliamentary system it is about how the Parliament 

is a check on the executive branch. But ultimately the Parliament and public are concerned about getting the best value for 

money. If we get perverse results, that is not the best value of 

money. The issue is how do we get performance management 

and targets that actually are going to drive our performance? 

One of the issues is there is a need for a longer time period. We 

may need more than a 12-month cycle. We need to look long 

term rather than ‘what did we do in the last 12 months just so 

I don’t get beat up.’ ” 

Two other officials expressed frustration over the large 

number of measures and the frequent audit processes they 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 47

experience. “We feel we are submerged in the audit process. 

By evaluating short-term auditing and accountability 

measures we often get distracted by whether we’ve made 

incremental gains rather than the end game. . . . It becomes 

paralysis by analysis. You spend more time reporting what 

you are doing that you spend time doing.”

“You are better off to have a few (measures) that everyone 

understands than this broad suite. You start thinking you 

need a wide array, but that becomes almost impossible to 

measure.” 

“We’ve been running 8 years on performance reports, and 

we find that everyone is so exhausted from dreaming up the 

measure and populating the measure that the consequences 

of failing to meet the measure is zero.”

Candid, Confidential Reporting Has Its 

Place

Several agencies cited examples in which their performance 

reporting was used to criticize the agency, either in the media or 

in political debates. Several acknowledged that such criticism 

creates a desire to set easily achievable targets, hide or downplay 

problems, or play “metric games,” which undermine the 

transparency and accountability of performance management.

All of the agencies had some form of candid, confidential 

reporting of results to central ministries. Great Britain 

used the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) delivery 

assessment, an uncompromising, truthful assessment 

conducted every 6 months as a confidential tool. It was 

conducted as an evidenced self-assessment and action-setting 

exercise by government departments that was challenged and 

moderated by the PMDU. It drove the agency’s actions for 

the next 6 months. It allowed for candid discussions with 

central governments about agency performance, steps that 

may be needed to improve performance, improvement 

ideas, and best practices. 

The Australian Results and Services Plans were confidential, 

as were the monthly Swedish reports to the central budget 

authorities. While it is unlikely that U.S. transportation 

agencies would be able to produce documents that are exempt 

from public record laws, all of the officials said that a forum 

for candid discussion with central agencies about the realities 

of performance and why it may be lagging is an essential 

component of their performance management systems. 

The candid forums allowed realistic discussions about what 

hinders performance or the reasonableness of targets.
48 TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND EMERGING ISSUES
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 49

From Building Highways to 

Moving People

The six agencies visited were in a state of transition—

in terms of both their organization and their basic 

mission. 

Three of the six agencies the scan team visited were in the 

process of reorganizing to merge the highway division with 

the state or regional transit agency. The mergers were driven 

by a central government desire to move from a traditional 

highway-centric approach to a broader, more inclusive 

strategy of surface transportation planning.

“We are moving people, we are serving business, and we 

are moving freight. We are no longer in the business of just 

moving cars,” said a New South Wales official. “We are no 

longer in the business of counting cars. It is about 

allocating road space.”

“We are a travel agency. That is what we are involved with. 

It is not just the road,” said an SRA official. “We are 

community builders.”

“The most important message was that we are the road 

authority, but we manage the transport network as one 

network that includes roads, buses, and trains. More and 

more, we are doing integration,” said a VicRoads official in 

Melbourne. “From a road authority perspective, we can’t 

build enough roads. If we did, it would not be a city anyone 

wants to live in. We need to manage the demand in travel.”

The cause and effect of the agencies’ performance management 

systems and their shift to holistic transportation agencies were 

not entirely clear. It appeared that the agencies’ forecast of 

continuing degradation in travel time pushed them beyond 

strategies of only expanding highways. The agencies placed great 

emphasis on transit service, rail passenger service, land use 

integration, and moving people and freight as well as vehicles. 

In Stockholm, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Auckland, 

significant population growth and increases in traffic 

congestion were forecast to overwhelm the already-congested 

highway network. Sydney has a population of 4.4 million and 

is projected to grow by another 1.2 million. Melbourne is at 

3.6 million, but officials believe the city will grow to 5 million 

by 2030. Brisbane is at 1.7 million today, but is expected to 

grow to as much as 2.9 million by 2026. 

The agencies’ refocus from just highways to a more diverse, 

integrated transportation network appeared to be driven by 

several factors. Public complaints about highway congestion 

combined with public reluctance for new highway capacity 

have driven some to emphasize transit options. The agencies’ 

forecast on travel time reliability caused them to question 

whether they can add sufficient highway capacity to accommodate such growth. Concern about climate change appeared 

to be a much greater issue among the populace than in the 

United States. Finally, the cities in all of the countries 

appeared to have a greater willingness to influence land 

use development than is common in many U.S. regions. 

In metropolitan Sydney, the regional plan calls for 70 percent 

of the future growth to be in the central city area by infilling 

existing brownfields. Melbourne is emphasizing growth in 

five business districts across its region. 

In Queensland, transportation executives said their major 

challenges are congestion, population growth, environmental 

sustainability, infrastructure development, and safety. 

In nearly all five categories, the challenges influenced them 

to support an integrated transportation system. 

`Their minister recently announced the formation of an 

Office of Sustainable Transport to increase focus on 

an environmentally compatible transportation system. 

`The region has invested heavily in busways and has one of 

the largest busway networks in the world, with more than 

AUD1 billion (USD1.1 billion) in busways under 

development or in place.

`Avoidance and mitigation of environmental impacts are 

Chapter 5

Reorganization and Refocus
50 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 

now a high-priority concern for the agency, as are its 

contributions to greenhouse gas emission reductions. 

`The merger of the transit and highway agencies was 

intended to further break down barriers to integrating the 

network efficiently, without regard for funding sources. 

`The state government took over management of the 

transit agencies to increase their coordination and efficiency of routes. It also subsidizes them significantly to 

increase ridership.

`The state government coordinated fares between transit 

providers to increase the ease of transfer and is considering 

embedding a transit fare chip into drivers’ licenses. 

Through these comprehensive strategies, Queensland 

is looking to address growth, environmental goals, and 

congestion strategies through increased transportation 

system integration.

Victoria officials said the growth the region is experiencing is 

unmatched since the 1850s gold rush boom. Their long-range 

planning compels them to confront land use challenges as 

they plan how to sustain mobility across the network in 

the rapidly growing metropolitan region. They said it is 

difficult to overestimate the degree to which their plans 

call for integrating a rail, tram, bus, bicycling, and highway 

network into the development of the expanding region. 

To them, the integration of transportation and land use 

planning is an overriding consideration. 

Social, Environmental Goals Are Evident

Closely related to the integrated transportation planning 

and delivery approach is the agencies’ focus on environmental issues. All of the agencies visited had greenhouse gas 

emission reduction strategies as part of the performance 

measures focused on environmental concerns. Officials 

in all of the visited agencies said that climate change 

concerns were so important to the public that they 

were a driving factor in government policy, including 

transportation policy.

All of the agencies examined demonstrated a strong commitment to addressing climate change, even if they acknowledged 

they lack the strategies to achieve the ambitious long-term 

carbon-reduction goals their nations have established. Despite 

their nations’ and agencies’ strong commitment to addressing 

climate change, none of the agencies faced mandates to reduce 

miles or kilometers traveled. Their transportation-related 

climate change strategies relied on other tactics, such as 

improving vehicular fuel efficiency, reducing use of electricity 

in lighting and buildings, and encouraging nonautomobile 

passenger travel.

“Building a greener future means that low-carbon travel 

must be a genuine, viable, and attractive option for businesses 

and ordinary citizens,” said the British secretary of state for 

transport in the Department for Transport’s report, Low 

Carbon Transport: A Greener Future. “It does not mean 

government dictating which particular mode of travel people 

should use. Instead, what I want is to widen the options 

so that it is easier and a natural part of life for people—

and businesses—to go for a low-carbon option.”

British Low-Carbon Transport Strategies

The British government is a signatory to the Kyoto and 

European Union climate change agreements. It also has a 

national Climate Change Act. Collectively, those agreements 

resulted in a national goal to reduce carbon emissions by 

80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, with an intermediate 

goal of 34 percent by 2020.

The British government displayed a comprehensive set of 

strategies for reducing carbon emissions from transportation 

(figure 16). Its strategies fall into three areas:

`Low-carbon technologies and cleaner fuels for vehicles

`Promoting choice for personal travel, business travel, 

and freight

`Using market mechanisms to send the right signals by 

incorporating the cost of carbon into transport decisions

Its strategies did not include targets for reducing kilometers 

traveled. Instead, it relied on a complete life-cycle approach to 

transportation carbon reduction that addresses fuels, vehicles, 

increased provision of transit and rail services, land use 

integration with transit, international cap-and-trade agreements for carbon, increased movement of freight by rail and 

water, and expanded research on transportation technology.

The British also promote “active travel,” such as walking and 

cycling. Their reports indicate that in England, 60 percent 

of the population lives within a 15-minute bicycle ride of 

a railway station, but only 2 percent of the trips to stations 

are made by bike. They have announced a GBP5 million 

(USD8 million) program to install cycling storage facilities 

at rail stations nationwide.

“If we get this right,” their major report said of their carbon 

approach, “by 2050 we can expect to see a fundamentally 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 51

different transport system in this country. Road and rail 

transport will be largely decarbonized. The technical 

challenges are greater for aviation and shipping, but these 

modes too will have seen a transformative improvement in 

efficiency.”

The British carbon-reduction performance goals for transportation rely heavily on decreasing emissions from the fleet, 

including cars, vans, large trucks, buses, trains, ships, and 

aircraft. For cars, the British have agreed to an EU strategy 

to produce significantly cleaner vehicles. The Department 

for Transport has funded a demonstration project for electric 

cars and, through the Technology Strategy Board, research 

and development funding is available to encourage further 

technical innovation in cars. The British also are supporting 

and testing cleaner vans. They are still exploring incentives for 

trucking, including examining regulation, investment, and 

best practices. They are incentivizing bus contractors to invest 

in cleaner vehicles. They are examining ambitious rail electrification and exploring further high-speed rail lines. They said 

the technological challenges for aviation and shipping are 

more difficult, but they support increased regulation and 

research to address those sectors.

Both England and Sweden promote “eco-driving,” which 

involves training drivers to slow their rate of acceleration 

and stopping to increase vehicle efficiency. The Safe and Fuel 

Efficient Driving program includes eco-driving training for 

van and large truck drivers.

The government has invested GBP17 million (USD28 million) 

in promoting intermodal facilities to increase a shift from truck 

to rail or water shipping. It also has pledged to work with the 

freight industry to develop a common method for estimating 

carbon emissions from various types of freight operations. This 

accounting will be a first step toward a standardized estimation 

of carbon reduction from freight strategies.

Of the nation’s 34 percent carbon reduction goal between 

2008 and 2020, the transportation sector has a goal to 

contribute a 14 percent reduction in carbon emissions. 

The various strategies the Department for Transport has 

proposed would enable it to achieve its 2020 goal, largely 

through the use of cleaner vehicles and fuels across all modes, 

but primarily in the automotive, van, bus, and truck sectors. 

Achieving the goals beyond 2020 appears more difficult and 

less certain, officials said. Those larger reductions cannot be 

achieved with available technology. Unless significantly 

different technology comes into the market, additional 

reductions will have to come from reductions in automotive 

travel, something that is more challenging to accomplish and 

that has a potentially higher economic cost. They noted that 

the Department for Transport has responsibility over only 20 

percent of the vehicle-kilometers traveled, while the remaining network is managed by local and regional governments. 

“Providing choices is better than forcing people to change. . . . 

You can only go where your people are willing to be led,” said 

one HA official.

Figure 16. British officials are implementing strategies to meet their carbon targets.

Sending the Right Signals

R&D/

public

procurement

Delivering

vehicle efficiency 

measures

Alternatives Freight Smarter

choices Information

Fiscal

measures Biofuels Emissionstrading

Technology

and

innovation

Remove

barriers to 

change

Carbon pricing

(tax, trading, 

regulation)
52 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 

The agency has produced a carbon-tracking tool so it can 

measure reduction strategies consistently. The Microsoft® 

Excel-based tool estimates carbon production from five 

main areas of HA transport operations:

`Energy consumption in buildings and highways

`Amount of carbon generated by all business travel from 

cars, air, public transport, and agency staff commuting

`Materials used in construction

`Waste generated by agency business operations and 

highway construction 

The categories of carbon use are estimated for internal 

operations, highway operations, major construction projects, 

contractors who manage regional maintenance, privatized 

construction contracts, and tolling stations. The tool estimated that HA’s carbon footprint for 2008–2009 was about 

550,000 tons. 

HA is exploring many strategies to reduce the agency’s carbon 

footprint. It is conducting research on turning off highway 

lighting after midnight, a trial program that has saved 400 

tons of carbon, but has not appeared to increase crashes. It is 

seeking renewable energy sources for its operations, increasing 

the use of recycled materials, and trying to emphasize lean 

construction strategies to use less energy during construction. 

Traffic operational strategies are a major component of its 

approach to reducing its carbon footprint as well.

Victoria’s Triple Bottom Line

The Victoria Department of Transport and VicRoads have 

long relied on triple bottom line performance measurement 

reporting to fully capture their effects on the environment. 

Triple bottom line reporting involves reporting performance 

on social, economic, and environmental factors in addition 

to business operations factors. 

For many years, VicRoads has reported on environmental 

measures, such as the number of environmental citations it 

has received for violations on construction projects or maintenance activities. It has tracked a measure to reduce the amount 

of potable water used on construction sites and it measures a 

host of impacts from daily operations. Both it and the Department of Transport measure office energy use, paper generation, water use, fleet mileage, and overall waste generation. 

Despite Victoria’s impressive multimodal transportation 

system with its massive investment in trams, trains, and buses, 

its primary driver for those investments has been congestion 

relief and overall quality of life in the city. Those measures 

have not been linked to a specific greenhouse gas emission 

reduction goal. The state government has a long-term goal 

of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent between 

2000 and 2050. That goal, however, does not include a 

specific target for transport emissions.

“There is no simple, single solution to reducing transport 

emissions,” said the government’s policy paper on climate 

change. “This conclusion is echoed by a wide range of studies 

from Australia to overseas, which indicate that there are three 

broad options for reducing emissions from the transport 

sector:”

`Reducing the number of trips

`Encouraging mode shift

`Promoting low-emission vehicles and transport

The state government noted that the massive investment it 

is making in the Victorian Transport Plan is its best effort 

to address transport emissions. 

Swedish Road Administration 

Sustainability Measures

SRA officials said that environmental sustainability is a 

priority issue in their nation and that their transportation 

performance measurement system has embraced the reporting 

of environmental measures as another way to demonstrate the 

agency’s responsiveness to public concerns.

SRA reports performance metrics for greenhouse gas 

emissions, other emissions such as hydrocarbons and nitrous 

oxides, the number of persons exposed to excessive highway 

noise, and the impacts of highway runoff in water catchment 

areas. SRA officials said that with their environmentally 

conscious population, environmental issues are very 

important, on par with economic concerns.

SRA reported that to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it 

has adopted strategies promoting eco-driving, urging people 

to buy more efficient vehicles, promoting the use of transit, 

and reducing speed limits on many sections of road to 

reduce emissions and improve safety. It estimated that 

eco-driving has reduced carbon emissions by 29,000 tons, 

the campaign to influence motorist choice by 21,000 tons, 

speed limit changes by 6,000 tons, lighting changes by 4,000 

tons, and various other measures by 6,000 tons (table 3). 

In all, it estimated its efforts reduced carbon emissions 

by 72,000 tons in 2008. 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 53

Cross-Cutting Coordination 

A related finding from the agencies was that they appeared 

to work more frequently with other cabinet agencies on 

cross-cutting issues, such as economic development, public 

health, and climate change. In part, this appeared to be the 

result of multiple agencies sharing responsibility for crosscutting policy goals. 

In Sweden, the strong SRA focus on environmental 

sustainability, reduction in greenhouse emissions, and gender 

equality is influenced by a cabinet form of government in 

which government decisions are formed by consensus among 

all cabinet ministers. As a result, the concerns of the Ministry 

of the Environment and Ministry for Enterprise have 

significant influence on SRA policies. 

The British Department for Transport shares responsibility 

for climate change with the Department of Health; Department for Children, Schools, and Families; and Department of 

Energy and Climate Change. The Public Service Agreements 

in Great Britain specify a lead agency, but also specify 

supporting agencies that are required to coordinate their 

efforts to achieve the goals.

In New South Wales, RTA is clustered in the state cabinet 

in the Employment and Economic Development portfolio, 

which includes the agencies of Planning, Transport, and 

Industry and Investment. In its State Plan, responsibility 

for cross-cutting issues such as environmental sustainability 

and economic development is parsed among different 

cabinet agencies, which are expected to cooperate on 

joint initiatives.

Safety Focus is Emphatic

The performance management systems in the visited 

agencies were attuned particularly to focus on highway safety. 

The agencies not only had safety as a primary strategic goal, 

but their performance management systems included detailed 

reporting of strategies to reduce crashes. All of the agencies 

had crash rates noticeably lower than those in the United 

States (figure 17).

Figure 17. All of the agencies examined had fatality rates significantly below the U.S. average.

Table 3. Swedish emission reduction trends.

Swedish Transport Carbon Emission Trends (Millions of tons)

1990 1995 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

CO2 Tons 17.2 17.0 18.0 18.2 18.3 19.1 19.4 19.7 19.6 19.8 19.4

Cars % 72 71 69 69 70 67 66 65 64 64 63

Trucks % 18 19 20 20 19 21 22 22 22 22 23

Buses % 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

International comparison: Deaths per 100,000 population

16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

Deaths per 100,000 population

—— United States of America

—— New Zealand

—— Australia

—— France

—— Sweden

—— United Kingdom

——

▲ Netherlands

■

●

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

■ ■ ■ ■

▲ ■ ■ ■

▲ ▲ ▲

▲ ▲ ▲
54 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 

The Swedish and Australian agencies, in particular, achieved 

significant safety reductions by applying performance 

management tactics to reduce the number of crashes. They 

targeted not only black spot, or high-crash, locations, but they 

also applied programmatic treatments such as extensive cable 

barriers and skid-resistant pavements. In addition, they rely 

heavily on increased police surveillance, automated speed 

enforcement, and random alcohol breath tests to reduce 

speed and crashes. 

Swedish Safety Performance Management

Sweden’s rate of highway traffic fatalities per 100,000 persons 

is less than half the U.S. rate. Despite starting from a relatively 

low number of crashes, the Swedish safety performance 

management system continues to achieve reductions in both 

fatal and injury crashes on its highway network. Fatalities fell 

from more than 500 in the early 1990s to 397 in 2008, the 

lowest number since 1945. Sweden has used a multifaceted 

and holistic approach to crash reduction that includes the 

following efforts:

`Calibrating speed limits—In 2008, SRA introduced a 

new speed limit scheme based on a 10-stage system. Speed 

was reduced on 2,400 km of roads and increased on 910 

km. The limits are based on how safe the road is in terms 

of alignment and roadside obstructions.

`Speed cameras—An additional 100 fixed and 15 mobile 

speed cameras were introduced in 2008 alone for a total 

6,700 km of national roads with automated traffic cameras.

`Traffic separation—A total 230 km of roads had traffic 

separated with cable median barriers, median barriers, 

guardrail, or medians added in 2008. Now 53 percent 

of total kilometers traveled are on roads with median 

separation, and the goal is to achieve 75 percent of all 

travel on separated roads by 2020.

`Centerline rumble strips—More than 800 km 

of centerline rumble strips were added in 2008.

`Seatbelt use—Use has risen to 95 percent.

New South Wales Safety Focus

The New South Wales RTA created a Centre for Road Safety 

to focus on vehicle improvements, behavioral changes, safer 

roadways, and technology improvements. The center is 

developing a business plan with specific goals and targets 

in each area.

The safety approach displayed in New South Wales was 

quite impressive, with an analytic and granular series of 

countermeasures and targets intended to address different 

types of crashes. The strategies include not only reducing 

crash risks on highways, but also making highways more 

forgiving so that when a crash does occur the roadway features 

limit the forces and energy to which motorists are exposed.

The center reported that the most important behavioral factor 

it will focus on is speeding. It reported that up to 45 percent 

of all road deaths are attributable to excessive speed. The 

center and RTA will address speeding the following ways:

`Developing speed zoning, similar to Sweden’s, that is 

more sensitive to localized road conditions and road 

crash history

`Starting antispeeding public campaigns aimed at 

changing driver behavior

`Working with the New South Wales Police Force to 

increase speed enforcement during holiday periods

`Operating point-to-point technology on heavy vehicles 

at key locations

`Conducting research on recidivist speeders

`Conducting safety reviews of crash-prone highways

`Seeking out and correcting areas with low skid resistance, 

poor alignment, inadequate clear zones, and roadside 

hazards

`Conducting analysis of the safety impacts of all projects 

built to ensure they include positive safety features

The center is developing a series of key performance indicators for safety. Existing ones include fatalities per 100,000 

population, fatalities per 100 million km traveled, and the 

number of fatalities involving young drivers.

It also is developing indicators to measure the effect of 

behavioral strategies, such as the reduction in the number of 

fatalities in which speed was a factor, the percentage of heavy 

vehicles exceeding the speed limit, and fatalities in which 

seatbelts were not used. For outputs, it will measure the 

number of miles of highways on which speed cameras have 

been installed, the percentage of high speed-prone areas 

identified for enforcement, and the number of reducedspeed limits instituted in high-pedestrian areas. 

RTA and the Road Safety Centre broke down high-crash, or 

black spot, areas into great detail. In the process, they learned 

that roadway departure crashes were most common on curves 

where the radius was sufficiently tight to cause handling 

maneuvering difficulty, but not tight enough to cause drivers 

to slow down appreciably. Tighter curves caused drivers to 

slow down sufficiently to avoid roadway departures, while 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 55

larger radii curves could safely accommodate the roadway 

speed. By honing in on curves with these specific problem 

radii, they targeted limited safety funds and effectively 

reduced roadway departure crashes. NZTA pursued similar 

radii analysis to identify crash-prone curves for additional 

treatment.

Victoria’s Renowned Safety Improvements 

VicRoads in Victoria, Australia, has been cited frequently 

for its significant improvement in highway safety in the past 

decade. The scan team found continued emphasis on the 

state’s safety performance management system during the 

2009 scan as well. The government has a goal of a another 

30 percent reduction in highway fatalities by 2017.

The Victoria government became aggressive in the early 

2000s by implementing strategies such as installation 

of speed cameras, increased enforcement, stepped-up 

behavioral campaigns, and increased engineering treatments 

on highways. The current effort builds on earlier successes 

by deploying additional strategies and treatments based on 

an effectiveness analysis of the original safety programs. 

The agency worked with university researchers to model 

past successes so that the benefits of additional 

treatments could be forecast. 

It began a 10-year Arrive Alive! strategy with 3-year action 

plans, with each component of the plan tracked to an 

individual manager to ensure accountability. The results 

are summarized and reported quarterly to the minister 

for transport (figure 18).

The agency also engaged the community to test the degree of 

public support for aggressive interventions and found substantial support for strategies such as stepped-up enforcement. 

The public support led to innovative funding programs, such 

as an additional fee when motorists buy car insurance. The 

proceeds are used to fund additional safety treatments. A levy 

of AUD84.70 was imposed on motorcycle registrations, and 

the proceeds are devoted to motorcycle safety improvement 

projects. A Victorian Motorcycle Advisory Council advises the 

minster on use of the funds, which have been prioritized for 

education and training, engineering and technology, enforcement, and enhanced data collection. To date, 51 motorcycle 

black spot projects have been completed, with a 38 percent 

crash reduction rate at those locations. Motorcycle fatalities in 

Victoria have fallen 20 percent since 2002, despite a 15 percent 

increase for the rest of Australia. Projects selected by the two 

funds have an average benefit-cost ratio of at least 3:1.

Another popular program is the “grey spot” program. It 

targets locations that have a propensity for crashes even if they 

Figure 18. Victoria tracks its fatalities throughout the year against its yearly target for continuing reductions.

Victorian Fatalities

Rolling 12 Month Totals—January 2002 to December 2007

500

480

460

440

420

400

380

360

340

320

300

Jan-02

Mar-02

May-02

July-02

Sep-02Nov-02

Jan-03

Mar-03

May-03

July-03

Sep-03

Nov-03

Jan-04

Mar-04

May-04

July-04

Sep-04

Nov-04

Jan-05

Mar-05

May-05

July-05

Sep-05

Nov-05

Jan-06

Mar-06

May-06

July-06

Sep-06

Nov-06

Jan-07

Mar-07

May-07

July-07

Sep-07

Nov-07

Rolling 12-month total

Annual average (99-01)

Arrive Alive! target

Victorian Fatalities

Rolling 12-Month Totals—January 2002 to December 2007
56 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 

have not had enough crashes to qualify for the black spot 

program. It has invested AUD31 million over 3 years on 

locations based on a crash risk calculation. Almost half of the 

spending has been to reduce run-off-the-road crashes, with 

the most common treatment being cable barriers. 

Innovation in Reliability

Several agencies displayed a very progressive attitude toward 

highway operations, spurred by their efforts to meet reliability 

goals. The British, in particular, have invested considerable 

effort in measuring reliability on high-volume national routes. 

All of the agencies reported that their reliability measures 

were evolving and they were not entirely satisfied with their 

measurement tools. However, it was clear that the more 

urbanized agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and 

Sweden have invested considerable effort in measuring 

real-time highway, transit, and rail operations to improve 

travel time reliability, enhance transportation choices, and 

reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Great Britain’s Highway Reliability Efforts

In Great Britain, Department for Transport officials said they 

changed their entire approach to relieving congestion on 

major national routes when tight revenues and increasing 

public resistance to land takings prevented the widening of 

highways (figure 19). However, the nation’s performance goals 

required improvement in travel reliability. As a result, the 

department adopted a “sweating-the-asset” approach to use 

advanced operations strategies to squeeze more capacity out 

of the existing freeway network.

British officials said that beginning in 2002 the agency 

changed its mindset from being a network builder to a 

network operator. The public demanded improvement in 

travel time reliability, but had little acceptance for projects 

that increased the footprint of existing motorways. The 

motorway system in England is only 2 percent of the total 

network, but it carries one-third of all traffic and two-thirds 

of all freight. Travel time data showed steady increases in 

congestion, and the agency’s forecasts predicted that reliability would continue to suffer. The agency also was under 

pressure to reduce crashes. Its performance measures for crash 

reduction spurred action, as did the secondary benefit of 

preventing delay on the motorways when crashes occurred. 

The first major change to bring about new capability as a 

network operator was the introduction of the Traffic Officer 

Service to assume responsibility for routine traffic management from the police on motorways. The U.K. Department 

for Transport had been downsizing for three decades, but 

it made an exception to that policy by hiring 1,500 traffic 

officers to assist with the program. The officers do not have 

enforcement powers, but they are equipped with uniforms, 

vehicles, flashing lights, and other tools to instruct motorists 

and assist them when they are involved in crashes. Traffic 

officers were operating across England by 2007. This program 

has offered more incremental benefits than new or widened 

roads, but it has tackled nonrecurrent delays, which are the 

most difficult for motorists to plan their journeys around, 

and has provided benefits much more immediately than 

traditional road-building solutions.

The second major change was the introduction of managed 

motorways, where the focus has been on opening the 

shoulders during congested periods (figure 20) and making 

Figure 19. Traffic on Great Britain’s M25 illustrates the 

congestion challenges facing the nation.
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 57

a substantially more intensive use of intelligent transportation 

systems technology to manage traffic. 

An expensive, contentious highway-widening project would 

take years to plan, approve, design, and construct. Such 

projects “future proof ” congestion, while operational 

strategies provide nearly immediate relief, officials said. 

The strategies work in the existing right-of-way and involve 

adding dynamic signage, closed-circuit cameras, response 

crews, and operational strategies to manage incidents. A key 

aspect of the British approach is the hard-shoulder running 

strategy, or the opening of shoulders as travel lanes in peak 

times or during incidents. The program was so successful 

that the department minister recently announced that HA 

would add 520 additional lane-miles, 340 of which are 

managed shoulders. 

Division officials said the programmatic use of hard shoulders 

combined with real-time operations led to a profound shift 

in agency culture on managing motorways. Now, managing 

lanes is viewed as a core, ongoing business function that 

combines teams of multidisciplinary traffic engineers, information technicians, and on-the-road officers and maintenance 

crews to respond immediately to incidents. The program led 

to the development of a suite of strategies and skills, such as 

improved equipment for quick crash analysis. Emergency 

response trucks are dispatched to assist with crash 

scenes and set up temporary signage. Best practices and manuals are produced to teach responders how to manage scenes safely. Predetermined 

detour routes are planned for when serious 

incidents close lanes. Driver location signs were 

installed so motorists calling from the roadway 

can identify their location easily.

British officials said the program requires 

four elements:

`A process to open the shoulder

`An incident management regime

`A maintenance strategy

`A compliance and enforcement regime

British officials said the conventional wisdom 

at first was that closing the shoulders would 

decrease safety, but that has not been the case. 

Instead, the driving environment created by 

combining hard-shoulder use with traffic 

management technology has substantially 

improved safety. They constructed turnout 

areas along the routes and observed them by closed-circuit 

television to monitor if unsafe conditions occurred because 

disabled vehicles had trouble accessing the turnouts. They 

said the observation revealed few problems and indicated 

that most stopped motorists who used the turnouts did 

so for an emergency restroom break. 

“What did we lose in use of the shoulder? The question is 

what were we gaining from these things in the first place 

or were they just a safety blanket?” the official asked.

British officials were effusive about the success of the program. 

The HA divisional director said it provided meaningful 

congestion relief, fewer crashes, and greater reliability for 

the motorway network in his region. He predicted that such 

operations strategies will be viewed as the natural transition 

to making better use of scarce motorway capacity.

Reliability Measure

The underlying performance measure that spurred HA’s 

approach was the reliability performance measure the agency 

had negotiated with the Treasury in 2004. Several years of 

tracking the measure combined with the inability to afford 

and get approval for major widenings led to the operational 

strategy adoption.

Figure 20. The use of shoulders during peak periods has become

a common British congestion strategy.
The agency believes it is one of the few, if not the only 

agency, to actively track reliability performance on a

daily basis across an entire national network. The agency 

identified a Strategic Road Network of 2,700 km (1,678 mi) 

of motorways and 4,350 km (2,703 mi) of other trunk 

routes. It divided those routes into 103 sections with

2,500 total links. 

The HA Traffic Information System database holds the 

average journey time traffic flow of every link of that

network for every 15-minute time period. The travel

speed and reliability data come from several sources, 

including inductive loops, traffic plate cameras, and Global 

Positioning System (GPS) tracking systems. The data are 

compiled into ongoing travel speed data and compared

to a 2004 baseline. 

From the data, officials measure the amount of delay on

the 10 percent most congested sections of the network. 

Reliability is measured as average vehicle delay on the 

slowest 10 percent of the journeys. The slowest 10 percent

of journeys are selected for each 15-minute departure time 

between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. for each day of the week on 95

of the 103 routes on the Strategic Road Network. 

A dashboard is produced that illustrates rolling averages

of travel time at locations across the network. Observation 

of the data over time led to a greater appreciation for

the following:

`Effect of incidents and crashes blocking lanes

`Effect of construction projects in contributing to delay

`Ability to locate areas of recurring congestion

`Effect of weather (figure 21)

`Effect of major events, such as festivals, on network traffic

The analysis led to many types of interventions and significant 

increases in accountability. The focus of measurement in the 

10 urban areas is “person journey times.” Officials estimated 

that the total reliability measurement program and its 

associated interventions produced a 3:1 benefit-cost ratio.

British officials said their network reliability program has 

improved their understanding of system performance and

led to increased evaluation of intervention strategies. But they 

acknowledged they are not completely satisfied with their 

program and want to improve it. They noted that measuring 

reliability is difficult because of shortcomings in data,

definitions of what reliability is, and the lack of sensitivity

to intervention strategies. The results of their interventions 

and measurement revealed that for a 10-mi (16-km) journey,

a motorist undertaking one of the 10 percent slowest journeys 

would be subject to 3.4 minutes of delay, compared to 3.9 

minutes before the interventions. Such metrics are difficult

to explain to the public, they said. Such small differences

in average travel time could be attributed partially to the 

economic downturn, which depressed overall travel. They

are pleased that their system responded to the Treasury 

requirement that they uniformly measure and improve

travel time on the major highway 

network. But they also acknowledged that explaining the results of 

the reliability measure to the public 

and decisionmakers is difficult, and 

this is the focus for improvement. 

New South Wale

Reliability Innovations 

The Sydney region has been a world 

leader in highway management 

since it developed the Sydney 

Coordinated Adaptive Traffic 

System (SCATS) in the 1970s.

The ever-evolving computerized 

control system links the region’s 

traffic signals to optimize signal 

timing and traffic flow across the 

entire region. The RTA-developed 

software is widely used across 

Figure 21. Great Britain’s reliability indices allow the nation’s transportation officials

to track delay and how it is affected by events such as weather.

58 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 59

Australia and has been exported to more than 130 cities in 30 

countries. New South Wales officials said it is a very adaptive 

system that continually responds to changes in traffic. 

A Public Transportation Information System tracks buses in 

real time and alerts the bus if it is more than 2 minutes late.

It also can coordinate with SCATS to provide signal preemption to keep buses on schedule and moving efficiently. 

The New South Wales RTA measures reliability by monitoring morning and evening average travel times on its seven 

most important urban routes. It has invested considerably in 

both operational and capital improvements to sustain travel 

times as the population grows. 

Queensland Reliability Emphasis

In addition to making large investments in busways around 

Brisbane, the Queensland Department of Transport and 

Main Roads is combining various city and suburban traffic 

operations units into regional traffic management centers. 

The department will coordinate and manage all of the 

region’s urban traffic signals with one system. It will coordinate the operations of the various local transit bus providers 

as well.

Similar to New South Wales, Queensland tracks travel 

reliability by measuring morning and evening travel speeds

on a representative section of the urban network.

Victoria Traffic Monitoring

Victoria produces an annual report on the performance

and management of its freeway and arterial network. It has 

monitored travel performance on its network since 1994.

It reports travel speeds, travel volumes, tram speeds and 

reliability, journey trends by bicycling, and traffic volumes. 

The report feeds into its travel time reliability measures,

which influence investment in projects and programs to 

improve reliability.

Swedish Reliability Measures 

SRA produces a large and highly granular series of measures 

on accessibility to transportation, travel time, and travel 

reliability. It measures the travel times to major towns for rural 

residents and reports changes over time. Because of the large 

number of unpaved rural roads subject to seasonal weather 

damage, travel times to larger population centers for rural 

residents can change seasonally. The average travel time for 

rural residents and by area are tracked and reported as part

of the agency’s travel time reliability measure. In its 2008 

summary, it reported degradation in overall rural travel times 

to population centers, with 813,000 people having improved 

travel times and 1,133,000 having lengthened travel times. 

SRA tracks travel speeds on major routes in its three major 

cities, Stockholm, Malmo, and Goteberg. It reported in 2008 

that travel speeds had generally increased in Stockholm and 

Goteberg and declined slightly in Malmo. It reported on the 

steps taken in each area to improve traffic flow and reliability 

and reported on planned improvement strategies for the

next year.
60 REORGANIZATION AND REFOCUS 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 61

At a time when the United States works to define

a Federal-State-regional-local framework for 

transportation performance management, the 

international examples hold many clear lessons.

The performance management systems of the studied agencies 

showed clear linkage between government expenditures and 

transportation agency results. The agencies demonstrated 

cost-effectiveness and continued improvement. They displayed responsiveness to emerging social concerns, such as 

climate change and urban sprawl. They clearly established

the condition of their assets and the future consequences 

of current investments. The overall impression the scan

team gathered from meetings with six leading performance 

management agencies is that similar performance practices 

could be implemented effectively in the United States. 

Throughout the interviews, international transportation 

officials offered similar advice based on more than a decade 

of performance management experience. As a result, many 

had a long-term perspective to share on how attempts at 

performance management tend to begin, why they succeed, 

how they fail, and how they evolve. The following four 

major strategies summarize the strategies deployed abroad. 

The broad strategies are followed by 16 specific tactics 

that the scan team recommends for consideration in the 

United States. 

Strategies for Implementation 

“Do It With People, Not To Them”

None of the officials the scan team met with recommended 

mandating performance targets and imposing penalties if 

agencies fail to meet them. The officials had years of experience meeting performance goals set by central governments 

and ensuring that local governments achieve performance 

goals set by state and national governments. The agencies had 

the perspective of being the receiver of performance expectations from higher levels of government and the evaluators of 

performance by local or regional governments. Officials from 

Sweden, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all 

described a similar approach. They urged a collaborative goaland target-setting process. Many relied on negotiated service 

agreements in which different levels of government negotiate 

goals and targets. Negotiation allowed implementing agencies 

to help select targets and priorities that make sense in their 

local contexts. 

Great Britain’s evolution in national performance management was particularly enlightening. The central government 

initially developed a broad range of more than 2,000 metrics 

in its desire to ensure performance by its national agencies, 

regional organizations, and local governments. For more than 

a decade, national, regional, and local governments struggled 

with the burden of reporting. Gradually, the measures were 

reduced. Now local and regional governments report on a 

much smaller number of measures, and they decide what 

targets to meet for each measure. The new approach is 

intended to provide uniform national reporting for trend 

monitoring, but it also allows local governments to pick

the focus areas important to their communities.

Instead of a regulatory and punitive approach to measuring 

performance, the agencies described a supportive and 

collaborative one. Clearly, expectations were set by the 

central government for the state transportation agency or

by the state agency for local agencies. However, the expectations were negotiated and failure to meet targets brought 

collaboration, not penalization. The relationships between 

levels of government were much more like a coach-andplayer relationship than an umpire-player relationship.

The joint setting of targets and tracking of trajectory to 

target was intended to create a shared sense of purpose and 

collaboration between levels of government. Metrics were 

used to track performance over time, not as short-term 

means to penalize a lack of a performance.

When performance targets were not met, the central agency 

was more likely to resort to engagement, training, peer review, 

and root-cause analysis with the agency that failed to meet

a target. In only limited cases did one level of government 

Chapter 6

Key Lessons Learned
62 KEY LESSONS LEARNED

sanction another for failure to meet an imposed transportation performance target.

The lack of sanctions in their performance management 

systems should not be construed as a lack of substance. To 

the contrary, the long-term focus on process improvement, 

performance reporting, and accountability in all of the 

agencies visited led to continual improvement in performance. What drove that performance was seldom fear 

of a penalty and more often a desire to achieve a higher 

level of service. 

Focus on Long-Term Improvement, Not 

Short-Term Targets

As long ago as 1991 in their book Reinventing Government,

Osborne and Gaebler warned about common shortcomings 

with performance measurement. When agencies are rewarded 

or penalized based on narrow performance targets, it is 

possible to skew logical behavior so that the agencies achieve 

the targets, even if the achievement creates other inefficiencies 

or costs. Agencies may be tempted to “cream” or skim off the 

top easy accomplishments to achieve numeric targets while 

avoiding more difficult, but possibly more important, activities. Measures must evolve, because they seldom are perfect. 

Qualitative analysis must be conducted along with quantitative analysis, because numbers alone seldom capture all 

aspects of performance, Osborne and Gaebler wrote.

The advice to not focus only on short-term metrics was 

confirmed in the scan, even if the agencies visited used 

different language to express it. All of them emphasized that 

the advantage of performance management was the tracking 

of long-term trends and the seeking of continuous improvement. Short-term targets are suspect, was the advice of many. 

Specific, short-term targets are suspect because data are often 

unreliable. Outside circumstances such as weather and 

economic crisis can influence short-term performance and 

cause targets to be missed through no fault of the agency. 

Most important outcomes can be achieved only over a 

number of years, not in a month or quarter. Major accomplishments, such as improving systemwide pavement conditions, reducing congestion, lowering crash rates, and 

integrating transportation and land use, cannot be achieved in 

uniform quarterly increments. However, they can be achieved 

over many years of steady focus, collaboration, and effort. 

During those years, progress will ebb and flow and targets will 

occasionally be missed. However, the most important objective is to achieve long-term improvement. Tracking long-term 

performance serves two important ends, which cannot be 

addressed through measuring only short-term metrics. First, 

focusing on long-term trends tends to minimize disruptive 

overreaction to fluctuations in performance caused by poor 

data or outside circumstances. Second, it encourages investments that provide the greatest long-term payoff, even if they 

do not produce the greatest short-term metrics. This focus on 

the best long-term investment is particularly important to 

managing infrastructure assets over their entire life cycle. 

At all of the agencies visited, officials emphasized that the 

advantage of performance management was that it led to 

long-term, continuous improvement. The iterative setting of 

goals, measuring of performance, analysis of results, and 

readjustment of effort were the major benefits they emphasized. A focus on short-term targets can lead to “metric 

games,” which result in the apparent achievement of shortterm targets without regard for whether long-term performance has actually improved. Only after measuring for a 

number of years can agencies truly understand if they 

improved transportation system performance. “You can’t 

invent this kind of scheme overnight. It has taken us 

10 years,” advised one British transportation official.

Focus on Outcomes, Not Process

The agencies the scan team visited appeared to focus more 

on outcomes than processes. In Great Britain, the focus on 

reliability led to innovative operations strategies that caused 

HA and police departments to reappraise their normal 

approach to alleviating congestion and reducing crashes. In 

Sweden, the highway agency collaborated with the postal 

service to have postal workers plow snow between rural 

mailboxes in the far north. In Queensland, the road authorities intentionally blurred funding sources and jurisdictional 

boundaries to encourage collaboration among state and local 

governments on maintenance of rural roads. In New South 

Wales, producing safer young drivers was valued more than 

quickly processing new drivers’ licenses. In three agencies, 

barriers between the highway and transit organizations were 

broken down to reduce traditional transportation silos. These 

examples illustrate what appeared to be a significant focus on 

achieving important outcomes. It was not common to hear 

the agencies speak about adherence to process.

Related to the focus on outcomes was the expression of 

government goals for transportation. In the agencies visited, 

the outcomes they sought to achieve derived from clearly 

articulated central government goals for transportation. 

The states and nations had a statutory process in which the 

central government was required to express the broad goals 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 63

and outcomes it desired from the transportation agencies—

national and state agencies as well as local and regional 

agencies. These government outcomes did not include 

narrow performance targets. Rather, they expressed broad 

policy aspirations. The agencies, in turn, translated those 

policy aspirations into clear goals, measures, and targets, 

which they then reported. The systems observed abroad did 

result in transportation agency activities driven largely by a 

need to achieve the central government’s desired outcomes. 

However, the central government did not appear to require 

a detailed or prescriptive planning process to achieve those 

outcomes. Instead, the transportation agency negotiated 

the process, measures, and targets to meet the government 

objectives. Continuous negotiation, dialogue, and regular 

reporting of results assured the central government that the 

transportation agencies achieved the outcomes it desired. 

It appeared that achieving outcomes was more important 

than adhering to process. 

Don’t Expect Clear Linkage of 

Performance and Budgets

Explicit linkages between agency performance and agency 

budget levels were not found. As one British official said, 

there was no mechanistic linkage between how well an agency 

performed—or failed to perform—and the amount of 

funding it received. Funding increases tended to be incremental and based on how much money the government had once 

other services were funded. Transportation funding increases 

or decreases were not observed to be tied to the agencies’ 

ability or inability to achieve a performance target.

Most of the agencies visited abroad displayed sophisticated 

asset management systems that were linked to their performance management systems. As a result, the agencies could 

clearly demonstrate needed funding levels to sustain system 

conditions for bridges, pavements, and maintenance needs. 

However, the agencies repeatedly reported that demonstrated maintenance needs—and demonstrated agency 

performance—did not trigger funding increases 

commensurate with those needs. 

These statements on the lack of linkage between budgets and 

performance should not be construed to mean that performance data were inconsequential in the budget process. 

Performance data clearly were important. Performance data 

were used to measure agency accomplishments, track trends, 

and hold the agency accountable. However, the data on 

system conditions and system performance did not appear—

by themselves—to trigger higher levels of government 

expenditures to achieve specific performance targets, nor 

were penalties and rewards for performance common.

Where the scan team found a substantial increase in

transportation investment was in relation to the achievement of broad, new national visions. The team found major 

funding programs in several instances. They were spurred

by national objectives to stimulate the economy, improve 

important corridors, transform urban landscapes, and 

achieve ambitious national visions. 

Potential U.S. Tactics for Implementation 

As the United States considers a national performance 

management system for its transportation programs, the 

following tactics appear to hold great promise. They result 

from the best practices documented abroad and from the 

observations of the scanning team. 

1. Articulate a limited number of high-level national 

transportation policy goals that are linked to a clear 

set of measures and targets. 

2. Negotiate intergovernmental agreements on how 

State, regional, and local agencies will achieve national 

goals while translating them into State, regional, and 

local context and priorities. 

3. Evaluate performance by tracking the measures and 

reporting them in clear language appropriate for the 

audience.

4. Collaborate with State, regional, and local agencies 

to achieve the targets by emphasizing incentives, 

training, and support—instead of penalties—

as the preferred way to advance performance.

5. Perpetuate long-term improvement by understanding 

that the real value of performance management is the 

development of an improved decisionmaking and 

investment process, not the achievement of many 

arbitrary, short-term targets.

6. Improve the use of benefit-cost analysis and risk 

management to demonstrate value for money. 

Consider major project postconstruction evaluations 

to assess whether benefits included in the original 

benefit-cost assessments were realized. 

7. Recognize that major national visions, not achievement 

of narrow targets, tend to generate new investment.

8. Convert long-term deferred maintenance needs into a 

long-term future liability calculation. This clearly links 

the budget to long-term system sustainability.

9. Demonstrate accountability for fund expenditures 

by producing annual performance reports on agency 

achievements.
64 KEY LESSONS LEARNED

10. Instead of using technical jargon, report results with 

language meaningful to the public, such as “the 

journey home” or “support for the journey.” Detailed, 

technical terms should be used for internal reporting, 

but should be translated into understandable language 

for the public. 

11. Collaborate with other cabinet agencies, including 

conducting periodic meetings with top leadership on 

cross-cutting issues such as economic development, 

public health, highway safety, and climate change.

12. Have a strong safety focus and document the results 

of safety measures, in addition to the usual measures of 

infrastructure condition, internal operations, transit, 

and ontime rail performance. 

13. Focus on desired outcomes for travel time reliability 

that lead to expanded strategies for highway operations. 

14. Learn from international examples of addressing 

climate change that rely on improving vehicles, fuels, 

and modal choice, but do not mandate reductions in 

travel or mobility.

15. Provide resources to enable high-quality data tracking, 

analysis, and reporting capabilities that allow for the 

use of performance data in decisionmaking.

16. Recognize that performance management is not a 

black box or simplistic solution. It is a culture to grow 

in the agency as an important consideration in the 

decisionmaking and investment process.
For 2 weeks in July and August 2009, a scan team 

from the United States visited international 

transportation agencies with mature performance 

management systems to study how these organizations demonstrate accountability to elected officials and the 

public. In addition, the team examined how the agencies use 

goal-setting and performance measures to manage, explain, 

deliver, and adjust their transportation budgets and internal 

activities. The specific elements that the scan sought to 

examine in detail were the following:

`Examples of how national, state, or provincial strategic 

goals are translated into meaningful performance 

measures for the transportation agency

`Ways to establish effective and achievable performance 

levels based on input from the public, elected officials, 

and business community 

`Examples of tying performance and transparency to 

national, state, regional, and metropolitan plans and 

budgets 

`Ways transportation agencies can demonstrate good 

governance and accountability in meeting or exceeding 

performance expectations

`Advice on what works and what does not when 

performance measures are applied to Federal, State, 

or metropolitan transportation programs in the 

United States

The scan team members identified a large number of important implementation items that they recommend be pursued 

in the United States. These efforts fall into two general 

categories of outreach and research. Outreach efforts will 

disseminate the scan findings and help put the identified 

best practices into use in the United States. Research efforts 

will translate some aspects of the international best practices 

into useful American context. 

Outreach Efforts

1. Brief Congressional Staff on Findings 

from the Performance Management Scan

U.S. congressional committee staff and their counterparts in 

State legislatures will play key roles in advising elected officials 

on performance management. It is important that they 

understand requirements for effective implementation of 

performance management, lessons learned by lead States and 

other countries, potential ways to phase in implementation 

of performance-based programs, and benefits that can be 

realized from performance management. One briefing was 

conducted for the House Transportation and Infrastructure 

Committee staff. One was scheduled for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and a larger briefing will 

be scheduled after the report is published. Briefings will also 

be made to key members of Congress as requested.

AASHTO and FHWA will conduct these briefings as needed. 

Benefit: Congressional staff will have the latest information and experience from the scan as they make legislative 

decisions during the next reauthorization of funding for 

transportation programs.

2. Conduct CEO Workshop 

The team conducted a State DOT chief executive officers 

workshop at the 2009 AASHTO annual meeting to build 

consensus for the need for performance management and 

discuss characteristics of good performance management 

systems, how they can be used throughout the organization, 

and how organizations can get started in performance 

management. Material developed for this workshop will be 

used to conduct additional workshops geared to managers in 

charge of implementing and using performance management 

systems in different parts of the organization. A workshop 

was conducted at the February 2010 AASHTO Washington 

legislative briefing. Presentations were posted on the Web site 

of the AASHTO Standing Committee on Performance 

Management.

LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 65

Chapter 7

Implementation Plan 
Providing information to both State DOT chief executives 

and those directly implementing performance management 

systems will be beneficial in promoting the concepts and ideas 

learned from the scan. AASHTO members will conduct the 

CEO workshop at no cost. Costs for additional workshops 

will vary according to scope and audience. 

Benefit: DOT leaders in charge of developing and 

implementing performance measures will have the latest 

information and be able to share practical experiences.

3. Present Scan Findings, Recommendations, and Next Steps to Key Stakeholder 

Groups

There is widespread interest in the scan findings. Scan team 

members will make presentations at events across the country 

where performance management is on the agenda. Examples 

include meetings of TRB, AASHTO, U.S. DOT, and 

organizations such as the Association of Metropolitan 

Planning Organizations (AMPO), American Public Transportation Association, American Public Works Association 

(APWA), and National Association of County Engineers. 

Scan team members presented the scan findings at the Asset 

Management Conference in Portland, OR, in October 2009 

and the TRB annual meeting in Washington, DC, in January 

2010 and are scheduled to speak at the APWA annual 

meeting in August 2010. 

Benefit: Stakeholders will have the latest information and 

experience from the scan as they consider adopting or expanding their performance management efforts.

4. Develop Illustrative Ways to Present 

Performance Information 

The AASHTO Standing Committee on Performance 

Management has a Comparative Performance Measures 

Task Force that is working with States to identify and report 

performance metrics in key areas such as safety and pavement 

condition that would allow comparisons across States. 

FHWA and AASHTO are working to identify ways to map 

performance data to allow senior officials to quickly see 

patterns of performance across the country. 

There is significant variation in how States and MPOs 

measure asset condition, congestion, reliability of operations, safety, greenhouse gases, freight, the economy, and 

other aspects of transportation system performance. Some 

research is underway to synthesize current practice, but 

further research will be needed as the United States moves 

to greater use of performance management and States 

increasingly want to compare their performance with that 

of other States using common metrics. Comparative measurement efforts have been completed for project time and 

cost, pavement smoothness, and roadway fatalities. Work 

to assess common measures for bridge condition, reliability, 

and freight and economic growth remains to be done. 

AASHTO will work with the Standing Committee on 

Performance Management to consider pursuing a project 

to provide best practices on mapping performance 

information. Recently approved NCHRP Projects 

20-24(37)F and G will support this effort.

Benefit: DOT leaders in charge of developing and 

implementing performance measures will have the latest 

information and be able to share practical experiences.

5. Develop a Performance Management 

Web Site

Develop, pilot test,and maintain a performance management 

Web site (or system) to collect key performance data, using 

data from the comparative performance measures effort 

described in the fourth implementation item as a starting 

point. Several existing Web sites contain information and data 

on performance measurement, but no single site (or system) has the ability to collect and share performance measures 

and data from States and MPOs across key performance areas.

Recently approved NCHRP Project 20-24(37)F provides 

funding for development of the specifications for a performance management Web site.

Benefit: Key findings from the scan will be integrated into 

the Web site to reach the widest possible audience. Additional 

links will be posted to sites such as the TRB Performance 

Measurement Committee Web site.

6. Conduct Peer Reviews on Performance 

Management

Develop and conduct peer reviews (informal consultations) 

to help States examine their existing performance management programs and identify gaps, best practices, and 

opportunities for enhancements. These would be conducted 

either by a management consultant in partnership with 

other agencies or on a peer-to-peer basis. The focus would 

be to facilitate a noncompetitive and nonthreatening forum 

66 IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 67

that allows for frank discussions and sharing of expertise 

and best practices. 

FHWA, AASHTO, and AMPO should collaborate to offer 

these peer exchanges. They could be pursued voluntarily 

among States and MPOs or through a federally supported 

peer exchange program.

Benefit: States will gain valuable experience by sharing 

among themselves the lessons learned from various performance measurement programs.

Research Efforts

7. Evaluate Comparative Safety, 

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Efforts 

Fund a study of how safety and greenhouse gas emission 

performance metrics are developed in European and Nordic 

countries and by Austroads. All three groups use international 

associations to help them develop performance metrics. In 

Europe, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and 

Development conducts research and benchmarking among 

European countries in a variety of transportation areas, and 

the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (now the 

International Transport Forum) set broad goals for safety and 

greenhouse gas emissions. These European efforts are through 

a Brussels-based European governance body, the European 

Union Road Federation, and through individual country 

highway agencies, monitored by the Conference of European 

Directors of Roads in Paris. Similar comparative analysis 

efforts are underway among Scandinavian countries that 

participate in the Nordic Road Association. Likewise, Australian states and territories and New Zealand all cooperate with 

their AASHTO-like transportation association, Austroads, to 

develop a set of comparative performance measures. The study 

would focus on how these three cooperative organizations 

approach comparative measures on safety and greenhouse gas 

emissions, two high-profile emerging areas of measurement. 

An online data repository is needed to store performance data 

that States can use to benchmark their performance against 

other States. Austroads has done considerable work in this 

area that could be used as a model. The AASHTO Standing 

Committee on Performance Management has compiled an 

inventory of performance measures collected in each State. 

Any insights that Australia might share will be part of this 

followup study.

Benefit: The United States will gain from the experience 

of other countries on this important topic and use that 

knowledge in setting expected U.S. performance measures. 

Governance in the United States under a Federal system is 

comparable to the models used in the European Union 

and Australia. 

8. Synthesize Best Practices in 

Benefit-Cost Analysis

The United Kingdom uses benefit-cost analysis and the 

value-for-money concept not only for project appraisal, but 

also at the program level to assess appropriate targets in 

different performance areas to assure that those targets are 

consistent with value for money. Benefit-cost analysis is also 

used in Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. For benefit-cost 

analysis to complement performance-based management in 

improving transportation decisionmaking, guidance on its use 

should be updated to reflect applicable best practices from 

around the world, including quantification of such social costs 

as noise, air, and congestion. If appropriate, this guidance 

should also include value-for-money concepts used in the 

United Kingdom and other countries. Consideration should 

be given to updating the AASHTO user benefit-cost guide 

for evaluating multimodal projects. Most major MPOs 

conduct benefit-cost analyses for project prioritization for 

long-range plans and the Transportation Improvement 

Program. Guidance must be offered to MPOs for project 

and program evaluation also. The Austroads guides may 

be relevant to this effort.

AASHTO, U.S. DOT, and NCHRP should cooperate, using 

existing and new contract resources, to produce a synthesis 

of best practices in benefit-cost and value-for-money analysis, 

especially as they apply to performance management and 

multimodal surface transportation tradeoffs. The synthesis 

also should update existing guidance on benefit-cost analysis. 

Benefit: FHWA and States will be able to establish 

protocols for determining cost-benefit of various initiatives.

9. Develop Case Study Report on the Use 

of British Public Service Agreements 

In many areas of negotiated performance, service agreements 

are commonly used. In a service agreement, two or more 

parties can negotiate the cost, level of service, division of 

responsibilities, and monitoring processes desired for ongoing 

transactions. In Great Britain, Public Service Agreements are 

used to define roles and responsibilities for activities in 

support of 30 broad national goals. The Department for 
Transport has the lead in a Public Service Agreement to 

“deliver reliable and efficient transport networks that support 

economic growth,” but it also has specific responsibilities in 

several other Public Service Agreements related to community development, access to health and educational services, 

and climate change. The Public Service Agreement concept 

has potential in the United States. It could formalize roles and 

responsibilities of different Federal agencies for broad goals 

such as public safety, livable communities, and environmental 

sustainability. Public Service Agreements also could allow 

different levels of governments—such as FHWA and State 

DOTs—to negotiate performance targets and strategies 

necessary to satisfy a Federal performance management 

system. FHWA now uses Stewardship Agreements with 

States, but they lack the performance target detail common 

in the British Public Service Agreements.

AASHTO and FHWA could collaborate to produce a brief 

case study of how Public Service Agreements are used in 

Great Britain and their applicability in the U.S. transportation 

sector. 

Benefit: Federal, State, and local officials can consider 

whether the model used in the United Kingdom has 

applicability to their agencies.

10. Develop Research and Development 

Performance Management Roadmap

NCHRP has approved a project, NCHRP 20-24-(75), to lay 

out a multiyear research agenda. The roadmap could include 

projects such as the following:

Document Australian risk management practices. The use 

of risk management as another tool for making investment 

tradeoffs and demonstrating value for money appeared to be 

highly refined in Australia, particularly in New South Wales. 

It would be useful and informative to produce a short paper 

that better describes the use of risk management techniques 

for project-level alternatives analyses and cross-asset prioritization to better understand its applicability for the United 

States. AASHTO bridge management software is now being 

enhanced to include a risk module. 

AASHTO, FHWA, and NCHRP could cooperate to fund a 

brief paper on the use and applicability of risk management.

Benefit: FHWA, DOT, and other transportation 

decisionmakers will better understand risk management 

methodologies.

Develop guidance for measuring sustainability and 

livability. The pursuit of sustainable and livable communities 

is a high public priority. How to define, measure, and achieve 

the goals of sustainability and livability are open to debate. 

These areas are less mature in the transportation planning and 

development process than are more traditional issues such as 

infrastructure condition or congestion levels.

It would be important for FHWA, AASHTO, and NCHRP 

to collaborate to develop guidance and technical assistance in 

defining metrics and possible targets in these nontraditional 

and/or difficult-to-measure areas. Best practices in communicating performance information to key stakeholders should be 

examined, as well. This includes process techniques such as 

town hall meetings, the Web, and mass media, as well as 

content and format approaches.

Benefit: States and FHWA will have a common 

methodology to define, measure, and achieve sustainability 

and livability performance measures.

Create a performance management leadership module.

The scan team found many examples of management 

strategies that used performance measures to achieve 

improved performance. The team found that successful 

practitioners did not merely publish performance metrics, 

but used those metrics to track ongoing performance, 

hold managers accountable, and alter organizational 

performance to achieve higher results. Some strategies, 

tactics, and techniques international practitioners used 

included the following:

`Developed performance agreements with managers that 

were tied to the accomplishment of organizational 

performance targets.

`Conducted regular team meetings in which managers 

reviewed the organizational performance metrics and 

reported on efforts to achieve them.

`Developed Balanced Scorecards, not only for the entire 

organization but for every unit and manager in the 

organization. These scorecards were based on the organization’s performance metrics and cascaded throughout 

the organization.

`Briefed central authorities on organizational performance 

to ensure that they were aware of the agency’s performance 

and challenges.

`Published regular reports, both internally and publicly, 

that track the achievement of key measures and explained 

steps to improve performance when targets were not 

achieved.

68 IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 69

AASHTO, FHWA, and NCHRP could collaborate to 

produce a brief study on the management tactics that complement and enhance the utility of performance metrics.

Benefit: State, Federal, and local officials can benefit from 

the performance management tactics used by their overseas 

counterparts.
70 IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 71

I

t is becoming increasingly essential in the United States 

for transportation agencies at all levels of government to 

demonstrate credibility with elected officials and the 

public. The U.S. Congress is considering a performancebased transportation financing program that may require 

States and metropolitan planning organizations to document 

their accomplishments and results on a set of nationally and/

or regionally established goals. Although many transportation 

agencies use performance management (PM) programs, the 

programs and approaches can differ significantly. Also, in 

many cases, PM programs are not explicitly tied to national 

and State budgets or national strategic goals.

The purpose of this scan is to conduct indepth reviews 

of how transportation agencies in other countries apply 

transparent and accountable PM programs to budgets 

and budget requests at the national, state, provincial, 

metropolitan, or local levels. The scan also seeks to identify 

examples of how transportation budgets and programs 

directly link to accomplishment of national, provincial, 

and local strategic goals.

Performance measurement. For this study, the scan team 

used the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) 

definition of performance measurement as “the ongoing 

monitoring and reporting of program accomplishments, 

particularly progress toward preestablished goals.” The GAO 

defines a program as “any activity, project, function, or policy 

that has an identifiable purpose or set of objectives.” A 

“performance measure” is defined by the Federal Highway 

Administration as “a qualitative or quantitative measure of 

outcomes, outputs, efficiency, or cost-effectiveness. In general, 

measures should be related to an organization’s mission and 

programs, and should not merely measure one-time or 

short-term activities.”

Performance management. The American Association of 

State Highway and Transportation Officials defines PM as an 

ongoing process that translates strategic goals into relevant 

and detailed measures and targets that, along with resources, 

are continuously monitored to ensure achievement of 

published institutional goals. Comprehensive performance 

management uses the definition just described in all key 

functions of a transport agency, including policy development 

and long-range planning; programming and budgeting; 

program, project, and service delivery; system operation; 

and monitoring and reporting of results in a variety of 

forms to a variety of audiences.

Strategic Approach

A major objective of this study is to examine examples in 

which national, state, or provincial strategic goals are translated into meaningful performance measures for the transportation agency. We want to examine practices in which the 

transportation agency uses those measures to document its 

achievement of society’s transportation goals.

1. What were the strategic influences or specific catalyst 

that caused you to adopt performance management?

2. Is there alignment of strategic goals at the national, 

state, or provincial level down to the local level? If so, 

how does that work and how did your PM process 

help you?

3. At what level or multiple levels of government do 

transportation performance measurement and, more 

broadly, performance management occur: national, 

provincial, state, or local levels?

4. Has the process resulted in an improved connection 

between long-range transportation plans and the 

selection of individual projects?

5. Are there any performance measures in use that are 

based on national policies to affect growth in travel, 

such as reductions in vehicle-kilometers traveled, 

or achieve certain outcomes, such as reductions 

in greenhouse gas emissions or economic 

development?

6. How has the process affected the investment in different modes or in making tradeoffs between modes?

Appendix A

Amplifying Questions
72 AMPLIFYING QUESTIONS

Setting Performance Goals, Measures, 

and Targets

Another important objective of this scan is to identify ways 

to establish effective and achievable performance levels based 

on input from the public, elected officials, and the business 

community. We seek examples of how to set performance 

goals at the proper level—not just easily achievable goals.

7. How are goals, performance measures, and targets set 

by your agency? What role do key stakeholders play 

in setting targets? Who are they?

8. How are measures influenced by the availability 

of data?

9. What considerations of scale—national, state, local, 

and project level—go into the choice of any particular 

performance metric?

10. Were the costs to achieve performance targets 

considered as part of the process to set targets? 

If so, how do you make financial tradeoffs between 

competing goals?

11. What timeframes do the performance targets typically 

cover? Are both long-term goals and short-term 

targets established? 

12. How do you address significant differences between 

the conditions across the country or province, 

and how are these differences addressed in your 

performance measures and performance goals?

13. Do you emphasize outcomes, outputs, productivity, 

or satisfaction? Has this changed over time?

14. What organizational resources were required to 

implement your performance management process? 

Did you need to reorganize your organization or 

make other significant changes to accommodate 

performance management programs?

15. What types of functions are best suited to the use 

of performance measures and which are not? 

How did you decide?

Linking Performance, Budgets, 

and Results

Another important purpose of this scan is to find examples 

of tying performance and transparency to national and state, 

provincial, and metropolitan budgets. Many transportation 

officials in the United States believe it has become essential 

for their transportation agencies to demonstrate credibility 

with elected officials and the public, which may lead to 

sustained or increased funding for transportation. We also 

want to understand if budget or investment decisions 

between programs or geographic areas have been affected 

by the use of performance measures.

16. How have you used performance measures to explain 

financial needs to legislatures, administrators, the 

general public, and others to allow for the consideration of funding alternatives, etc.?

17. How are performance targets communicated to 

elected officials, the public, and the business 

community?

18. Have you used performance management in marketing 

campaigns to increase funding or investment in 

transportation? Were these successful?

19. What are the links between your agency’s performance 

management system and your agency’s budget?

20. Are measures and targets used to balance funding 

decisions for system preservation versus other 

important needs, such as system expansion or systems 

operations?

21. Are decisions to invest in one mode of transport versus 

another based on performance metrics or policy? 

22. Do you approach decisions about system preservation 

with the same decisionmaking process you use for 

making decisions about system operation, expansion, 

or enhancement? 

23. Has the use of performance measures changed the 

geographical or program distribution of funds?

Demonstrating Accountability

We are seeking ways transportation agencies can demonstrate 

good governance and accountability in meeting or exceeding 

performance expectations. We also want to understand how 

accountability is achieved.

24. Do your performance measures convince legislators 

of your efficiency and effectiveness?

25. What tools have you found work best with your 

constituents and stakeholders to describe results?

26. What happens when goals are not met?

27. Have programs, projects, or activities been dropped as 

a result of indicators of poor performance or a lack of 

public need? 

28. Are employees or organizations held accountable for 

meeting performance? If so, in what way? 

29. When two or more transportation or other public 

agencies have a role in meeting performance targets, 

how is accountability established for each agency?
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 73

30. When grants are made from one level of government 

to another, are grant recipients held accountable for 

achieving performance targets? How is this accomplished?

31. How well has your performance management 

process worked across different units and levels of 

government? For instance, between different state 

or provincial governments or between state or 

provincial governments and local governments? 

32. Do any governmental oversight agencies or thirdparty organizations review the transport agencies’ 

management independently? How do they use 

your performance measures information?

Lessons Learned

As the United States considers a national performance 

management program for transportation, we are very 

interested in your advice about what works and what does 

not when performance measures are applied to federal or 

multiregion transportation programs.

33. In what important ways has your performance 

management system evolved and why?

34. What are the most important lessons we should learn 

from your experience?

35. What was the biggest hurdle to overcome in linking 

performance measures and targets to resource 

allocation and funding decisions?

36. Were there unintended or negative consequences 

of using performance measurement? If so, what 

were they?

37. What are you most proud of in your performance 

management process?
74 AMPLIFYING QUESTIONS
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 75

Contact Information

Carlos M. Braceras (AASHTO Cochair)

Deputy Director 

Utah Department of Transportation

4501 South 2700 West, Box 141250

Salt Lake City, UT 84114-1250

Telephone: (801) 965-4030

Fax: (801) 965-4338

E-mail: cbraceras@utah.gov

Robert F. Tally, Jr. (FHWA Cochair)

Division Administrator

Federal Highway Administration Indiana Division

575 North Pennsylvania St., Room 254

Indianapolis, IN 46204

Telephone: (317) 226-7476

Fax: (317) 226-7341

E-mail: robert.tally@dot.gov

Gordon D. Proctor (Report Facilitator)

President

Gordon Proctor & Associates, Inc.

7825 Wiltshire Dr.

Dublin, OH 43016

Telephone: (614) 313-6421

Fax: (614) 733-6001

E-mail: goproctor@wowway.com

Daniela Bremmer

Director, Strategic Assessment

Strategic Planning and Programming

MS: 47374, Room 1A6

Washington State Department of Transportation

310 Maple Park Ave. SE

Olympia, WA

PO Box 47370

Olympia, WA 98504-7370 

Telephone: (360) 705-7953

Fax: (360) 705-6911

E-mail: bremmed@wsdot.wa.gov

Leon E. Hank

Chief Administrative Officer

Michigan Department of Transportation

425 W. Ottawa

PO Box 30050

Lansing, MI 48909

Telephone: (517) 241-2674 or (517) 373-2114

Fax: (517) 373-6457

E-mail: hankl@michigan.gov

Jane D. Hayse

Chief, Transportation Planning Division

Atlanta Regional Commission

40 Courtland St. NE

Atlanta, GA 30303

Telephone: (404) 463-3265

Fax: (404) 463-3254

E-mail: jhayse@atlantaregional.com

Anthony (Tony) R. Kane

Director, Engineering and Technical Services

American Association of State Highway and Transportation 

Officials

444 North Capitol St. NW, Suite 249

Washington, DC 20001

Telephone: (202) 624-5812

Fax: (202) 624-5469

E-mail: akane@aashto.org

Kristine L. Leiphart

Deputy Associate Administrator/Deputy CFO

Federal Transit Administration

Office of Budget and Policy

1200 New Jersey Ave. SE, Room E52-328

Washington, DC 20590

Telephone: (202) 366-2018

Fax: (202) 366-7989

E-mail: kristine.leiphart@dot.gov

Appendix B

Scan Team
76 SCAN TEAM

James (Jim) W. March

Acting Director

Office of Transportation Policy Studies, 

 Office of Policy and Governmental Affairs

Federal Highway Administration

1200 New Jersey Ave. SE

Washington, DC 20590

Telephone: (202) 366-9237

Fax: (202) 366-3297

E-mail: jim.march@dot.gov

Steven M. Pickrell

Senior Vice President and Manager

Transportation Planning and Management

Cambridge Systematics, Inc.

555 12th St., Suite 1600

Oakland, CA 94607

Telephone: (510) 873-8700

Fax: (510) 873-8701

E-mail: spickrell@camsys.com

J. Woody Stanley

Team Leader

Strategic Initiatives Team

Office of Policy and Governmental Affairs

Federal Highway Administration

HPTS, Room E83-123

1200 New Jersey Ave. SE

Washington, DC 20590

Telephone: (202) 366-9070

Fax: (202) 366-3590

E-mail: woody.stanley@dot.gov

Jenne van der Velde

Strategic Advisor, Asset Management

Rijkswaterstaat Centre for Transport and Navigation

Van der Burghweg 1

2628 CS Delft, The Netherlands

Telephone: 011+ 31 615 879 679

E-mail: jenne.vander.velde@rws.nl

Connie P. Yew

Stewardship/Oversight Team Leader

Office of Infrastructure

Federal Highway Administration

HIPA-40, Room E73-426

1200 New Jersey Ave. SE

Washington, DC 20590

Telephone: (202) 366-1078

Fax: (202) 366-3988

E-mail: connie.yew@dot.gov

Biographic Sketches

Carlos M. Braceras (AASHTO cochair) is the 

deputy director and chief engineer for the Utah Department 

of Transportation (DOT) in Salt Lake City, UT. Braceras is 

responsible for an agency of 1,800 employees with responsibility for planning, design, construction, operation, and 

maintenance of the 6,000-mile (9,656-kilometer) State system 

of roads and bridges. He is responsible for the department 

budget of about $1.5 billion per year. Using performance 

measures and targets to demonstrate accountability, Braceras 

works closely with State legislators to advance legislation and 

budgets to fulfill the department mission. Braceras leads a 

small team to develop the department’s strategic plan, which 

uses performance measures to communicate the department’s 

goals and results for the preceding year. Braceras has served 

with the Utah DOT for more than 22 years. He has a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Vermont and 

a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University 

of Utah. He is a licensed professional engineer in Utah. He 

serves as the secretary-treasurer for the American Association 

of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) 

and on several technical committees for AASHTO and the 

Transportation Research Board (TRB). 

Robert F. Tally, Jr. (FHWA cochair) is the division 

administrator for the Federal Highway Administration 

(FHWA) Indiana Division in Indianapolis, IN. Tally leads a 

multidisciplinary staff that delivers a $900 million federally 

funded transportation program in Indiana. He works with 

State, local, and private sector representatives to ensure that 

Federal funds are used effectively and efficiently to meet a 

set of performance expectations. He was instrumental in 

helping Indiana position itself to be able to lease the Indiana 

Toll Road for $3.85 billion in 2006. Before his current 

position, Tally served as the assistant division administrator 

in the FHWA Texas Division. In this capacity, he managed 

significant transportation projects, including public-private 

partnerships in Austin, Houston, and Dallas, that linked 

performance and accountability to revenue generation. He 

also served as a district engineer in the FHWA California 

Division, where he managed complex highway projects such 

as the San Francisco Bay Bridge project, which was funded 

through toll increases. Tally has bachelor’s and master’s 

degrees from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. 

He is a licensed professional engineer in South Carolina. 

He serves on a number of FHWA leadership advisory 

groups, chairs the FHWA Division Administrators’ Council, and is a member of the FHWA Senior Leadership Team. 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 77

Gordon D. Proctor (report facilitator) is the 

president of Gordon Proctor & Associates, Inc. His firm 

has conducted research on performance measures for the 

National Cooperative Freight Research Program, Strategic 

Highway Research Program, and National Cooperative 

Highway Research Program (NCHRP). In addition, he 

regularly lectures on performance management at the 

National Transportation Leadership Institute, the premier 

management training program for senior transportation 

officials in the United States. For 8 years, he was director 

of the Ohio Department of Transportation, where he led 

development of a comprehensive performance management 

system. The Ohio DOT’s use of performance measures has 

served as a case study for several national research efforts. He 

holds a master’s degree in public administration from Ohio 

State University and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from 

Ohio University. He has been active in AASHTO and TRB 

and serves as an oncall task order consultant for FHWA. 

Daniela Bremmer is the director of strategic 

assessment at the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). She is responsible for the agency’s strategic 

planning, performance management, and system performance 

analysis functions and develops WSDOT’s performance 

reports, such as the Gray Notebook. She is a nationally recognized expert on performance measurement and a frequent 

conference speaker, lecturer, and published author on the 

topic. Bremmer has a bachelor’s degree in business and 

computer science and a master’s degree in public administration from Evergreen State College in Washington. Bremmer 

chairs the TRB Performance Measurement Committee, leads 

the AASHTO Standing Committee on Highway Operations 

Measurement Task Force, and serves on AASHTO’s Standing 

Committee on Performance Management and other TRB 

committees and research panels. 

Leon E. Hank is the Michigan Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) chief administrative officer, overseeing 

the Bureaus of Finance and Administration, Transportation 

Planning, and Aeronautics and Freight Services and the 

operations of the International Bridge. He is also responsible 

for development and oversight of MDOT’s $3.4 billion 

budget. Before his appointment in 2002, Hank directed 

the Office of Financial Management for the Michigan State 

Budget Office. He served as the State’s financial controller, 

responsible for publishing the State’s financial statements 

and processing payroll for 64,000 employees. A licensed 

certified public accountant, Hank’s career spans 33 years, 

including various finance and technology positions in five 

State departments. He earned a master’s degree in business 

administration from Michigan State University and a finance 

degree from Central Michigan University. Hank chaired the 

National Association of State Controllers Committee on 

Accounting and Financial Reporting for 3 years. As a member 

of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Team, he made four trips to Asia and Africa to teach 

economic development and government regulation classes 

to the governments of 25 developing nations.

Jane D. Hayse is the chief of transportation planning 

for the Atlanta Regional Commission, the multidisciplinary 

planning agency for metropolitan Atlanta. Since 1998, she 

has led all transportation planning functions, which include 

development of the region’s long-range transportation plan, 

short-range programming, travel demand modeling, air 

quality analysis, and public outreach. In the most recent plan 

update, an extensive project prioritization methodology was 

developed to address congestion mitigation, environmental 

concerns, safety, and regional development goals for highway 

and transit projects. Hayse also initiated a corridor management program, local government comprehensive transportation plan program, and freight mobility program, all of which 

include transportation and land use linkages. She spearheaded 

creation of a regional thoroughfare plan and assisted in the 

creation of a regional Transit Implementation Board in her 

agency to coordinate various transit operators’ needs. She has 

a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from 

the University of North Carolina and a master’s degree in 

urban and regional planning from Florida State University. 

She is involved in several national efforts, such as NCHRP 

Report 594, Guidebook for Integrating Freight into Transportation Planning and Project Selection Processes, and NCHRP 

Project Panel 20-24, Implications for Transportation of a 

Conformity-Style Approach to Reduce Greenhouse Gases. Hayse 

is also a member of the Association of Metropolitan Planning 

Organizations’ policy committee.

Dr. Anthony (Tony) R. Kane is the director 

of Engineering and Technical Services for AASHTO. 

Kane oversees all highway-related technical activities of 

AASHTO and is the staff liaison to the State department of 

transportation chief executive officers and the new Standing 

Committee on Performance Management. In the past, he 

was the executive director of FHWA, where he championed 

performance accountability through corporate and program 

outcome measurements. Kane has a doctorate in business 

administration from George Washington University, 

a master’s degree in transportation from Northwestern 

University, and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from 

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He serves on many boards, 
78 SCAN TEAM

including two universities, the International Road Federation 

and World Road Association (PIARC), and three TRB 

committees related to the scan topic. 

Dr. Kristine L. Leiphart is the deputy associate 

administrator and deputy chief financial Officer (CFO) for 

the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). Serving as an 

advisor to the administrator on CFO issues, she manages a 

staff of 54 people who work for the Offices of Performance 

Management, Strategic Planning, Policy, Budget, Financial 

Management, and Financial Systems. Her office is responsible 

for producing FTA’s Annual Performance Plan and a quarterly 

performance report for the agency called Transit Trends. She 

is responsible for the transit-related information reported in 

the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Performance and 

Accountability Report and FHWA’s Conditions and Performance Report. Before joining FTA in 2006, Leiphart worked 

for the U.S. DOT’s Office of the Secretary, where she was 

the principal for the Performance and Accountability Report, 

which ranked first among 24 Federal agencies for several 

years. She was the author of the “Safety” chapter of the 

Conditions and Performance Report when she worked for 

FHWA’s Office of Safety in 2002 and 2003. Leiphart has 

bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern University 

and a doctorate degree from the School of Urban Planning 

at the University of Illinois. She is a member of the TRB 

Committee on Performance Measurement. 

James ( Jim) March is acting director of the Office of 

Transportation Policy Studies in the FHWA Office of Policy 

and Governmental Affairs. March leads FHWA efforts to 

develop a framework for a performance-based Federal-aid 

highway program. Throughout his career, March has worked 

on or directed studies to examine various aspects of transportation system performance, including the biennial report to 

the U.S. Congress on the conditions and performance of U.S. 

highway and transit systems. March has a bachelor’s degree in 

economics from the University of Virginia and completed 

course work for a master’s degree in transportation engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 

He has served on several committees of TRB, the Institute of 

Transportation Engineers, and AASHTO and is the liaison 

to AASHTO’s new Standing Committee on Performance 

Management. 

Steven M. Pickrell is a senior vice president of 

Cambridge Systematics and national manager of the firm’s 

transportation planning and management business line. 

He has more than 25 years of transportation consulting 

experience with emphasis on performance measurement 

for planning and programming at the State and regional 

levels. He was principal investigator for NCHRP Project 

8-32(2) and primary author of resulting NCHRP Report 

446, A Guidebook for Performance-Based Transportation 

Planning (2000), and principal investigator for NCHRP 

Project 7-15 and primary author of resulting NCHRP 

Report 618, Cost-Effective Performance Measures for Travel 

Time Delay, Variation, and Reliability (2008). He was 

project manager or consultant lead for several multimodal 

statewide transportation plans incorporating performance 

measures into project evaluation and prioritization, including MoveAZ (Arizona Department of Transportation) and 

the 2006 Oregon Transportation Plan. He helped develop 

performance-based programming and management systems 

for the Oregon Department of Transportation Highway 

Division, Montana Department of Transportation, 

Colorado Department of Transportation, and others. 

He contributed to and did peer evaluations of performancebased project prioritization methods for regional transportation planning agencies, including the Southern California 

Association of Governments, Santa Clara County 

Congestion Management Agency, and East-West Gateway 

Council of Governments. He coauthored Use of Performance 

Measures in Transportation Decisionmaking (TRB, 2000) 

and Linking Performance-Based Program Development

 and Delivery (TRB, 2004).

Dr . J. Woody Stanley is the acting leader of the 

Strategic Initiatives Team in the FHWA Office of Policy 

and Governmental Affairs in Washington, DC. He leads 

FHWA’s strategic and performance-based planning efforts 

and plays a central coordinating role in agency performance 

measurement, performance budgeting, and reporting 

activities. He has worked at the U.S. DOT since 1995 and 

before joining FHWA in 2001 held similar positions in 

the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the 

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Stanley 

has master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of 

North Carolina, a master’s degree in business administration 

from Duke University, and a doctor of public administration degree from the University of Southern California. 

He is an American Society for Quality certified quality 

manager and a member of several professional societies. 

Jenne van der Velde has worked as the senior 

strategic advisor for asset management for the Dutch Ministry 

of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management 

(Rijkswaterstaat) since 2009. Rijkswaterstaat is responsible for 

the performance, maintenance, and safety of 3,260 kilometers 

(2,000 miles) of highways, 1,686 kilometers (1,000 miles) of 
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 79

waterways, and 65,250 square kilometers (25,500 square 

miles) of water systems in the Netherlands. Van der Velde 

is responsible for implementing asset management at 

Rijkswaterstaat and developing the external knowledge 

base of asset management. Van der Velde has a master’s 

degree in civil engineering from the University of Delft. 

In the past, he worked for DHV, an engineering company 

in the Netherlands, as strategic advisor, specializing in 

drinking water projects. He also worked for Vitens, the 

largest publicly owned drinking water company in the 

Netherlands, where he was responsible for providing more 

than 5.5 million people with drinking water. At Vitens, he 

introduced the asset management model and was respon-

sible for implementation of the system. He regularly gives 

lectures on asset management. Connie P. Yew is the team leader for the Stewardship 

and Oversight Team in the FHWA Office of Infrastructure 

and has been with FHWA for 25 years. Yew directs the 

development and implementation of FHWA stewardship 

and oversight initiatives. Yew’s team helps guide FHWA 

so that Federal investment, particularly in infrastructure, 

is well managed and performing. In 2004, Yew cochaired an 

international scan on transportation performance measures. 

She participated in several national reviews, such as Strategies 

for Reducing Highway Project Delivery Time and Cost and 

Comparing State DOTs’ Construction Project Cost and Schedule 

Performance: 28 Best Practices from Nine States. Yew holds a 

bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of 

Maryland and a master’s degree in public administration from 

George Washington University. Yew is a licensed professional 

engineer in Maryland. She serves on several technical 

committees, including the TRB Committee on Performance 

Measurement, TRB Committee on Management and 

Productivity, and PIARC Committee on Managing 

Operational Risks in Road Operations.
80 SCAN TEAM
LINKING TRANSPORTATION PERFORMANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY 81

British Department for Transport

Maxine Burke

Strategic Roads Division

Department for Transport

5/25 Great Minster House

76 Marsham St.

London SW1P 4DR, United Kingdom

E-mail: maxine.burke@dft.gsi.gov.uk

Martin Capstick

Director

Strategic Roads and National Networks

Department for Transport

5/25 Great Minster House

76 Marsham St.

London SW1P 4DR, United Kingdom

E-mail: martin.capstick@dft.gsi.gov.uk

New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority

Randal Court

Senior Project Officer

Corporate Planning and Performance

Roads and Traffic Authority

101 Miller St.

North Sydney NSW 2060, Australia

E-mail: randal_court@rta.nsw.gov.au

Penelope Morris

Senior Project Officer

Corporate Planning and Performance

Roads and Traffic Authority

101 Miller St.

North Sydney NSW 2060, Australia

E-mail: penelope.morris@rta.nsw.gov.au

Brendan Nugent

General Manager

Corporate Planning and Performance

Roads and Traffic Authority

101 Miller St.

North Sydney NSW 2060, Australia

E-mail: brendan_nugent@rta.nsw.gov.au

New Zealand Transport Agency

Martin Matthews

Chief Executive

Ministry of Transport

89 The Terrace

PO Box 3175

Wellington 6140, New Zealand

E-mail: m.matthews@transport.govt.nz

Douceline Van Arts

International Engagement Portfolio Manager

NZ Transport Agency

Victoria Arcade

44 Victoria St., Private Bag 6995

Wellington 6141, New Zealand

E-mail: douceline.vanarts@nzta.govt.nz

Queensland Department of Transport 

and Main Roads

Raymond Matta

Director (Trade and International Relations)

Corporate Office

Queensland Government

Department of Main Roads

85 George St., Floor 3

GPO Box 1549, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia

E-mail: ray.z.matta@mainroads.qld.gov.au

Appendix C

Host Country Contacts
82 HOST COUNTRY CONTACTS

Alita Singer

Queensland Government

Department of Main Roads

85 George St., Floor 3

Brisbane, Queensland 4000, Australia

GPO Box 1549, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia

E-mail: alita.n.singer@transport.qld.gov.au

Swedish Road Administration

Marianne Nyberg

Head of Office

Strategic Management

Swedish Road Administration

SE-781 87 Borlange, Sweden

E-mail: marianne.nyberg@vv.se

Gunnar Tunkrans

Deputy Head, Operations Management

Head Office

Swedish Road Administration

SE-781 87 Borlange, Sweden

E-mail: gunnar.tunkrans@vv.se

Victoria Department of Transport

Jim Betts

Secretary

Department of Transport

121 Exhibition St., Level 16

PO Box 2797

Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia

E-mail: jim.betts@transport.vic.gov.au

Robert Freemantle

Executive Director

Network and Asset Planning

Vic Roads

60 Denmark St., Kew

Victoria 3101, Australia

E-mail: robert.freemantle@roads.vic.gov.au

Wendy Goad

Project Operations Officer

Vic Roads International

60 Denmark Street, Kew

Victoria, Australia 3101

E-mail: wendy.goad@roads.vic.gov.au

Dominica Ryan

Manager, Policy Coordination

Policy and Communications Division

Department of Transport

121 Exhibition St., Level 15

PO Box 2797

Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia

E-mail: dominica.ryan@transport.vic.gov.au

Peter Williams

Director, Commercial and Business Services

Technical and Information Services Division

VicRoads International

60 Denmark St., Kew

Victoria 3101, Australia

E-mail: peter.williams@roads.vic.au

Office of International Programs

FHWA/US DOT (HPIP)

1200 New Jersey Ave., SE • Washington, DC 20590

Tel: (202) 366-9636 • Fax: (202) 366-9626

international@fhwa.dot.gov • www.international.fhwa.dot.gov

Publication No. FHWA-PL-10-011

HPIP/4-10(3.5)EW