FHWA can offer broad guidance, but the details of evaluation, including specification of goals, outcomes, measures, data collection, and means of describing results are the responsibility of grantees. Because TCSP is a learning process, evaluation plans should focus on identifying what works and what does not. Participants discussed how can lessons be generalized to other situations, other parts of the community, and other regions. Key aspects of an evaluation plan are described below. Evaluation should be designed to answer fundamental questions that might be asked by other communities interested in similar strategies.
Products can include major reports produced by a local transportation planning process.
For example, twenty year long range plans, Transportation Improvement Programs, or land use plans can be examined to determine whether the project has demonstrable effects on actual decisions. Outcomes can be the most important but most difficult aspect of evaluations because they are so dependent on time horizons of projects. Because of the small scale of many projects it may be difficult to isolate changes in travel and other direct outcomes. Also, because outcomes from transportation and land use interactions can be very long term, some may be outside the horizon of TCSP evaluations. It is important to start collecting base line data from the beginning of the project to allow later evaluation of longer term outcomes.