By Mae Hanzlik, April 24, 2023
How do you know if your Complete Streets policy is working? You measure it. And then you share the results publicly. A strong Complete Streets policy requires tracking performance measures across a range of categories—including implementation and equity—and making someone responsible for doing it.
As the old saying goes, “what gets measured, gets done.” That rings true for Complete Streets policies too—if you want to make sure your Complete Streets policy is fully realized, you need to measure your progress.
Measuring performance in transportation is not new. But historically, transportation metrics have focused on motor vehicles with metrics like pavement quality and congestion. But adopting a strong Complete Streets policy represents a different approach to transportation which means committing to new performance measures that reflect the policy’s vision and motivation.
Performance measures provide a quantitative or qualitative indicator of the performance of a specific street, corridor, or of the whole transportation network. This information helps stakeholders better understand the impact of their Complete Streets policy and take corrective actions. For example, when progress is tracked:
The jurisdictions with the strongest Complete Streets policies take four clear, concrete steps:
1. Establish specific performance measures across a range of categories, including implementation and equity
2. Set a timeline for the recurring collection of performance measures
3. Require performance measures to be publicly shared
4. Assign responsibility for collecting and publicizing performance measures
As far as the specific measures are concerned, a community should adopt performance measures that reflect the community’s priorities, and more specifically reflect the overall vision and motivations stated in the Complete Streets policy itself. For example, if your community’s priority is improving health equity, one metric you might track is serious injuries by race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, disability status, and/or neighborhood. Measures should be tailored to a community’s priorities but they should also cover a wide range of categories to ensure a holistic evaluation of the transportation network. Some examples of categories your community might measure are safety, access, economy, public health, and environment.
Beyond these, it’s crucial to track two specific areas: policy implementation and equity. For the former, this could include tracking which internal policies and documents have been updated, how many staff members have been trained, how many exceptions have been approved, and how well the public engagement process is working. Equity is less of a specific single measure, and should instead be embedded within all performance measures; jurisdictions can do this by disaggregating the data by race, ethnicity, age, gender, income, disability status, and/or neighborhood. Measuring this information can help jurisdictions evaluate whether disparities are being exacerbated or mitigated.
Below is a list of examples that can be used.
Additional examples can be found in Evaluating Complete Streets Projects: A Guide for Practitioners.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this information is only valuable if it is made publicly available on a consistent basis. To do that means committing to a timeline of how often the data will be collected and published publicly and it means putting someone in charge of that process.
In our framework for evaluating and scoring Complete Streets policies, this element is worth a total of 13 out of 100 possible points.
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