ITS DATA QUALITY CONTROL AND THE CALCULATION OF MOBILITY PERFORMANCE MEASURES

This report describes the results of research on the use of intelligent transportation system (ITS) data in calculating mobility performance measures for ITS operations. The report also describes a data quality control process developed for the TransGuide (Registered trademark) detector data in San Antonio. The TransLink (Registered trademark) research team concluded that quality control is necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data collected by traffic management centers, and that it is desirable to implement quality control procedures as close to the data collection source as possible (i.e., local controller). Based upon this, the authors recommend that basic quality control checks (such as those shown in this report) be incorporated into standard practice for traffic management centers in Texas. The report presents performance measures for three levels of analysis: point/link, facility, and system. The performance measures can easily be calculated using speed and volume data currently collected by nearly all traffic management centers in Texas. The report also presents useful displays of performance measures that can be used to identify and illustrate traffic problems and the effects of improvements. The authors recommend that operations staff at selected traffic management centers experiment with using the recommended performance measures as an operations planning tool.