Book Description

The National Transportation System (NTS), an outgrowth of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), is proposed in this research as an analytical tool to guide national transportation policy making. The NTS must be based upon measures of transportation performance that are intermodal, user oriented, and suitable for tracking the environmental, social, and economic outcomes of transportation system use. A set of such performance measures is proposed, and implications of the measures for various modes are discussed. This proposal and discussion of performance measures is the critical component of this report. A major concern in the implementation of these performance measures is the data that supports them. A great deal of data is required to track the performance of the basic components of NTS analysis: major transportation facilities and regional transportation systems. Appropriate data sources for the NTS performance measures are identified, a sample of demonstration data is applied to the performance measures, and problems with data acquisition and application are discussed. A general framework for using the performance measures to achieve the NTS policy objective is proposed, and the implications of geographic information systems (GIS) and other technologies are discussed. Conclusions and recommendations from this research are presented.