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Prioritizing Highway Construction with a Benefits Analysis

The Virginia Department of Transportation began last year to implement a quantitative methodology as an aid to prioritizing highway construction improvements. The methodology adopts fifteen quantitative metrics used to evaluate the candidate projects. The results of the methodology are used by executive review teams to negotiate, interpret, and support decisions regarding the selection of construction improvements for funding in a $1.8B per year construction program. The agency is exploring how the methodology can provide transparency of project selection to the public, agency staff, legislators, and the commonwealth transportation board. The existing metrics need further modeling and aggregation to be meaningful. This effort describes an effort to extend the current prioritization methodology via modeling and uncertainty analysis of the aggregated risk reductions, benefits, and costs associated with the candidate construction improvements. The team developed monetized estimates of benefits in several categories including crashes avoided, travel time saved, fuel uses avoided, and emission avoided. The estimates of benefits were then compared to estimates of project costs, representing the uncertainty of the results as numerical intervals. The developed methodology is demonstrated with project data from nine districts with roughly four hundred candidate projects ranging in cost from $150K to over $100M. The results with our aggregated measures were compared to the results of the prioritization methodology that is currently in use. We conferred regularly with a project steering committee of metropolitan planning organizations, planning district commissions, agency engineers, planners, executives, and others