I would now like to turn the presentation over to today's call, Jocelyn Bauer. You may, Rhode. Good afternoon. Welcome to the web conference transportation performance measures so the public can understand. My name is Jocelyn Bauer and I will be giving a brief introduction before turning this over to Jerry Werner we are pleased to have as our moderator. Today's seminar is being recorded. Today's seminar will last 90 minutes and the final 30 minutes for audience question and answer. The operator will give you instructions how to ask questions. However, if during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Indicate who the direction the question is for. Please also make sure you send your question to all participants rather than just the host or speaker. Presenters will be unable to answer their questions during your presentations but Jerry will use some of the questions to start off the question and answer during the seminar. Finally I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and visual portion will be posted within the next week. To access the seminar visit talking operations.webex.com and click on the recorded events link on the left side of the page and choose the session you'd like to review. Available for viewing listening purposes only and cannot be saved to your own computer. We encourage you to direct others in your office who may not have been able to attend to access the recording. The power point presentations will be available shortly. Attendees will be notified of the available and a transcript of this seminar. At this time I would like to introduce Jerry Werner, the moderator of the webcast. Jerry serves ads editor of newsletter and web master of the in talk talks website. He is consultant and communicator since 1991. In 1998 he was Director of. The predecessor website, the cooperative deploy.network. In that role he chronicled key strategic developments in the ITS and transportation management operations or MO arena. Prior to starting at ICBN he founded the popular website. Jerry consulted for leading organizations including ITS America and the University of Minnesota's institute. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and retire to join the ITS field served as Director of Technology transfer for research consortium in Austin, Texas. Now I'll turn things over to Jerry Werner who will introduce our first speaker. Thanks very much, Jocelyn. Let get right to the presentations as we have a chalk full agenda today. The title of our webcast today is transportation performance measures that the understand. Our first presenter is Mr. Philip Tarnof, director for advanced technology at the University of Maryland and his talk as you can see is entitled customer focus performance measures. Phil's work includes preparation and delivery for training for the community, an active participant and leader number efforts on operations in such rolls as serving as a leader for the research agenda for operations and principle investigator for in talk sponsored measure of a short list of measures for performance evaluation. You'll hear much more about this shortly. Still also leads research in the areas of distance learning and transportation systems and provides support to the Maryland state highway transportation in the chart advanced traffic management system. Phil's been an active participant in maybe other projects including the wireless network for the Washington, D.C. region that enhances communication among first responders to emergencies. Retire to beginning his work with the university, president and founder of PB Paradahoumane. He was dealing with advanced technology too numerous to mention here. Phil worked at a division of a planning corporation in the federal highway corporation. Phil received his bachelor of science in engineering from Carnegie Melon University and a master of science in New York. He was given the prestigious Theodore M. Madison award. Phil, you can begin when you're ready. Thank you, Jerry. I'd like to wish everybody a good morning or afternoon as appropriate. I'd like to talk today a little bit in general terms about performance measures and what some of the issues are with performance measures and used with operations. And following that describe to you the work that we currently have underway trying to develop a standardized set of performance measures that can be applied nationally and provide both public and operators with a common language in which to compare their results and compare their activities. I'm going to begin by talking about the definition of performance measures and try to convince you why they're important with emphasis on customer focus. As I said talk about some of our ongoing activities including the measures that we currently have under consideration for selection. To begin with I'll read you this slide. Several aspects that are quite important. The definition is that they are the use of statistical evidence to determine progress toward specific organizational objectives. This includes evidence of actual fact such as measurement of surface and measurement of customer perception such as accomplished through customer satisfaction survey. You see we're talking about measures that are both quantifiable and those more qualitative which would be the customer satisfaction survey and talking about measures that are used internally by agencies for their own purposes as well as to communicate their performance to the public. Now one of the things that's important is no sense developing a measure for yourself for your own use unless you have defined also what is good. And this is true for both internal and external applications. We all talk about things such as signal timing. Signal timing in or region is terrible. Terrible compared to what? Compared to what the next community is doing, terrible compared to what is possible. This is an important aspect of coming up with a standardized set of numbers and that comparison will enable the public to evaluate their own agency's performance but also useful for agencies to determine how well they're doing to set standards for their own personnel but at the same time not all these measures can be quantified as I said so it's important to come up with measures qualitative as opposed to saying signal timing is terrible but at the same time meaningful. Now customer performance is very important. Received a lot of attention. As you can see this statement signed by President Clinton signed in 1993. They've been around for a while. He said the value of performance measures is to chart a course for every endeavor, see how well we are progressing, tell the public how we are doing and never stop improving the things we are investing in. The concept of performance measures that are useful to the public is essentially one in which the public agencies are reporting to their customers, the taxpayers and users of the transportation system. How effectively and intelligently they're using their money. I know we're talking about customer focus here but important to think about the agencies and how they use the performance measures internally. Agencies should be and many are beginning to use measures to evaluate their employees performance. Also using measures to interact with other stake holders which may not only be the public but could be other organizations with which they have to interface. The transportation field, the knee to communicate how their systems are performing to the agency next door or to the police or other agencies affected by what they're doing. And finally in order to establish goals for themselves so that they can decide the next year they'd like to improve performance in a particular area by a certain percent over what the performance that they achieved this year was, in order to do that, of course, again it's important to look at what other people have done, where they've had successes elsewhere in the country that can be imitated or copied so we can take advantage of the best practices of others. But it's important to realize that performance measures are not only used internally but externally so important to establish that balance when one is coming up with measures that everybody can understand and everybody can use. Now as far as our eye going activity, we currently have a project under way which is nearing completion that was initiated by an organization by ASTHO to develop is set of performance measures. It was picked up by the NTOC as I said the project is nearing completion. We expect to have a final report available in July. The goal, I'm repeating myself but the goal of the project has been to develop a common set of performance measures and we aimed for a list of about ten measures which has Tushed out to be quite a challenge. There are many, many measures used throughout the transportation community. Specifically addressing three types of situations. One is non-recurring congestion. That is congestion that occurs in unexpected ways. Recurring congestion. The most common example is morning and evening rush hours and system wide performance which are measures not associated with a roadway but effect a region. For example air pollution, fuel consumption, those things. And our challenge has been to get the transportation community to agree to a common set of measures they all feel are worth while and usable and measurable. We begin the work with a literature review which I'll describe to you in a minute and formed a steering committee of experts to work together to come up with an initial short list of measures. We met in Las Vegas with transportation engineers semi annual meeting and refined the list, made it shorter, worked on preliminary definitions and working with that final list developed in Las Vegas and trying to put more meat on the bones of the definitions which turns out to be quite a challenge. More difficult to define performance measures than one would expect and also talk about how they might be measured. Where they are political and where they aren't political. Quite an eye opener. We looked at more than 50 references and identified 50 measures asked by the transportation community for intentional and external applications. Some of these measures admittedly are variations on the same theme. A lot of ways of measures things such as speed, for example and each represents a different type of measure. This is the example that I just promised you. If one tries to define speed, it turns out there are a lot of different definitions of speed in common use. Average speed. How long did it take me to travel from point A to point B. Transit operating speeds, speeds on a freeway. I want to know my speed irregardless of how much time I spent on an ambulance or exit ramp, peak speeds and the two which are the biggest source of confusion. Space speed is a measure of the average speed in space from point A to point B which is what we're interested in. How long did it take me to get from point A to point B and timing speed. Timing speed is the speed that's collected by a vehicle detector that looks at a point and averages the speeds of all the vehicles passing that point. Space mean speed is more meaningful but time mean speed is more measurable. The issues we had to address when we are trying to come up with a single well defined measure. The third bullet on that current slide, some can be eliminated for example transit speed. We were going to focus on highway related measures. Not to say transit measures are not important. We decided we're not going to make progress at all if we don't start off with focus. Rightly or wrongly, focus on measures associated with highways recognizing that in the future it will be necessary to address transit measures as well. This is the beginning of the answer to the study. As I was telling you before, we developed an initial set of measures during that first committee meeting and this is the list. I'm sorry? I hear somebody talking to me. I'll continue on. The list was sorted into categories to ensure we had all the different situations I described before covered. I'm going to focus today's discussion in four general areas. They align closely it Phil's presentation but the first area I'll be talking about is how we measure the reduction of intents or crashes on roadways. second the importance of safety on our local streets. It's important to remember of the 43,000 approximate death that is occur on our roadways every year, 3/4 occur on local roads. One-fifth involve pedestrians so safety is important from that perspective. Talk about how we measure travel times and dray and touch on consumer satisfaction. Starting with reduction of incidents, this chart would be very meaningful to our customers, particularly or elected citizens. A high level measure but shows from 1987 on the left to 2004 on the bottom. That injury crashes have reduced from 4,224 all the way down to 2,354. Of significance is that rate column in the center where we had an injury rate of 4.8 per one thousand population -- that has continually been in the a downward direction to 3.5 per one thousand population in the 2004 year. Also we measured the fatal crashes as shown in the column second from the right. A little less meaningful and needs to be modified is the fatality crash rate per one thousand in decimals. It does not equate to a more meaningful measure to the general public. Because safety is so key, such a concern, too, to our citizens. Our mayor was quoted yesterday in our paper saying San Jose should aim at becoming the safest city for pedestrians especially for schoolchildren, seniors and the disabled. I'd like to touch on that just a little bit. Let's take a look at our pedestrian experience. This measurement is one that we provide with our city council every year and it touches our residents in that it occurs for people in your group and very much effects life and the quality of life so we strive to reduce our pedestrian and bicycle fatality because of the trauma that causes on a community. On the second column from the left you can see the total number of fatal crashes. The next column would show how many fatalities experiencing each year on our roadways. Then focus on pedestrian fatalities. This number for a city of our size is extremely low which I'll be sharing with you in a minute. On the second row from the bottom in 2003 was a year where we experienced an extremely low pedestrian fatality rate and we have been continually trying to lower this number all the way down to zero and that is our goal to add zero pedestrian fatalities on the roadways. In the early 1970s, approximately 30-40 pedestrian fatalities per year on our roadways. Going to the next slide, like to benchmark against other large cities. We requested pedestrian fatality information from 20 cities and responses from those shown. The rank by population is indicated in the second column from the left. Then the number of fatalities of pedestrians registered on the city's roadways shown on the right. Looking at the rate on the far right you can see how one city compares to the other. This is useful as professional engineer transportation planners work and strive to utilize solutions that are successful between agencies. Looking at local routes and travel delay is another area we measure and this is a meaningful way we share this information with our citizenry. Each year we have 20 routes deed -- defined local and five regional routes. We measure these routes all 25 of them every year during the peak hours of a.m., p.m. and off peak hours. What we can see interest a table like the one on your screen now is that for instance the first row Evergreen East which is a section of San Jose and the destination point to north San Jose in the a.m. period, the delay rate is about 2.606 minutes per mile. What that means is that for each mile of that trip, there's an additional two moneys per mile added to that trip during the a.m. peak period as compared to the off peak period. This is very meaningful as it allows us to compare travel times on corridors locally and regionally before and afternoon improvements are made on surrounding roadways. We also have developed a travel rate index and the travel rate index is shown here locally and regionally looking at the local one, this is an average of all of the 25 local roadways that we measure and the higher the indices, the more severe the congestion. For example an index of .25 would mean that a trip on a local roadway would take 20 minutes during an off peak would take 25 minutes during a peak period or 25 percent additional time factor. By averaging these 20 roadways you can show our citizens on local roads congestion is growing and freeway level due to enhancements our regional levels are decreasing. To give you an exam of meaningful measures so that we can focus on a reduction of incidents and maintaining better travel speeds in our city we have posted 31 dynamic signs that display drivers speed in school zones. These school signs are automatic, they are off during the night. They come on during school hour. They register 25 miles an hour until a vehicle occurs and then show the driver's speed. As you can see we've installed 3 of them. When our council members ask were they a good investment, we indicate that 86 percent of our motorists finds it effective in slowing traffic and a 6 percent average reduction in speed when they are activated. That's a meaningful measure. Another example are pavement embedded flashing light systems. We have 13 light systems in crosswalks throughout -- crosswalks through San Jose. We asked was it a good investment? We found it very effective increasing awareness day and night and the measurements here show that during the before these devices were installed, only 10 percent of motorists yielded to pedestrians compared to 49 percent in the after the lights were installed. In the evening the measurement is more dramatic where 5 percent approximately of the motorists yielded to pedestrians at night and 76 percent afterwards. We have pedestrian activated crosswalk warning signs. What these is they look like a conventional WB5 sign which is a yellow sign with a symbol of a pedestrian. The sign lights up and blinks or a beacon attached to that sign lights up and bings. We've installed four of these and found during the we had a 53 percent yield rate of vehicles of motorists to pedestrians before they were installed and 83 percent after. In the evening the statistics are show very positive. We also measure customer satisfaction. We do that every two years by telephone to 1,000 citizens throughout the city of San Jose. We do follow-up phone calls after service requests are made. An example of a customer satisfaction measure we use is the percent of customers rating our services based upon timelessness and added safety. Out of about 2,000 responses in 2003-2004 we had a 79 percent satisfaction rate.