The objective of the Conference on Performance Measures to Improve Transportation Systems and Agency Operations was to bring together a group of government, academic, and business leaders who have experience in performance measures for transportation systems as well as performance-based planning and programming to address the following: Organizational approaches to implementing and using performance measures in transportation systems, including the connection between performance measures and decision making; Implementation experience regarding the state of the practice as well as lessons and guidelines for moving forward; Customer perspectives of transportation system performance; Application of multimodal measures in the planning process and the assessment of system performance; and Technical issues involving data, number and type of measures, and trade-off analysis. Agency operations were addressed in the context of how operations affect performance measurement programs or how these programs can affect operations and decision making.

Each track consisted of a plenary session followed by three concurrent breakout sessions. These proceedings follow the conference format, with the plenary sessions and the breakout sessions for each of the five tracks presented in chronological order. The breakout sessions and the closing session gave participants the opportunity to provide ideas and suggestions on further research, technology transfer, and training. Research topics identified for potential consideration are listed in the section on concluding remarks. The conference also featured an interactive poster session. Summaries provided by the poster authors are presented in Appendix A. The conference attracted 130 participants from Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States, and featured transportation specialists who offered real-world expertise on the application of performance metrics and case studies.

"These proceedings contain a summary of the Transportation Research Board conference on U.S. and international approaches to performance measurement for transportation systems that was conducted on September 9-12, 2007, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies in Irvine, California. The theme for this third in a series of international conferences, Better Decisions and Better Communication, was selected to highlight opportunities for and experiences in using performance measurement as a strategic tool to better communicate goals and objectives and results to a wide range of stakeholder groups. Presentations highlighted cases in which performance measures have proved useful in guiding resource allocation decisions, improving day-to-day operations, establishing and demonstrating agency competency and accountability and, in some instances, making the case for more resources. The conference consisted of five plenary sessions, each followed by a series of corresponding, concurrent breakout sessions. The topics of the five plenary sessions were Performance Measures as an Organizational Management Tool to Establish Accountability, Communicating Performance Results Effectively to Your Customers, Data and Tools, Hot Topics (addressing the use of performance measures to gauge the effectiveness of tolling and congestion pricing and other innovative transportation strategies to address sustainability and safety issues), and Performance-Based Contracting and Measuring Project Delivery. Three resource papers were developed for the conference. The conference attracted 180 participants from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States and featured 70 transportation specialists offering real-world expertise, from the application of performance metrics to case studies drawn from six countries. This range of experiences provided attendees with a comprehensive overview of the performance measurement techniques and approaches being applied to transportation systems in the United States and abroad."--Pub. desc.