What is the best way to prioritize transportation projects in a community?

1 Define your objectives

Before you can prioritize transportation projects, you need to define what you want to achieve with them. What are the main problems or challenges that your community faces in terms of mobility, accessibility, safety, equity, and environment? What are the desired outcomes or benefits that you want to deliver to your community through transportation projects? How do you measure and quantify these outcomes or benefits? These questions can help you establish clear and specific objectives that guide your project evaluation and prioritization process.

2 Identify your criteria

Once you have your objectives, you need to identify the criteria that you will use to assess how well each transportation project meets them. Criteria are the standards or measures that you use to compare and rank different projects based on their performance, impacts, or value. For example, some common criteria for transportation projects are travel time savings, cost-effectiveness, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, social equity, safety improvement, and public support. You can also use qualitative or subjective criteria, such as aesthetics, compatibility, or innovation, depending on your objectives and preferences.

3 Assign your weights

Not all criteria are equally important for your community or your objectives. Therefore, you need to assign weights to each criterion to reflect their relative significance or priority. Weights are numerical values that indicate how much each criterion contributes to the overall score or rank of a project. For example, if you assign a weight of 0.4 to travel time savings and a weight of 0.2 to cost-effectiveness, it means that travel time savings are twice as important as cost-effectiveness for your project evaluation and prioritization. You can use different methods to assign weights, such as expert judgment, stakeholder input, or analytical techniques.

4 Score your projects

After you have your criteria and weights, you need to score each transportation project based on how well it performs or satisfies each criterion. Scores are numerical values that indicate the level of achievement or impact of a project for each criterion. For example, if you use a scale of 1 to 10 to score projects, a score of 10 means that a project performs very well or has a very positive impact for a criterion, while a score of 1 means that a project performs poorly or has a very negative impact for a criterion. You can use different methods to score projects, such as data analysis, modeling, surveys, or scoring matrices.

5 Rank your projects

Finally, you need to rank your transportation projects based on their total scores or weighted scores. Total scores are the sum of the scores for each criterion for a project, while weighted scores are the sum of the scores multiplied by the weights for each criterion for a project. For example, if a project has a score of 8 for travel time savings and a score of 6 for cost-effectiveness, and the weights are 0.4 and 0.2 respectively, the total score is 14 and the weighted score is 4.4. You can use different methods to rank projects, such as simple ranking, benefit-cost ratio, multi-criteria analysis, or decision support systems.

6 Communicate your results

The last step of the project evaluation and prioritization process is to communicate your results to the relevant stakeholders and the public. This step is crucial to ensure transparency, accountability, and legitimacy of your process and your decisions. You need to explain how you defined your objectives, identified your criteria, assigned your weights, scored your projects, and ranked your projects. You also need to provide the rationale and evidence for your results and address any questions or concerns that may arise. You can use different methods to communicate your results, such as reports, presentations, maps, charts, or interactive tools.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?