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Executive Summary: Today's transportation agencies need to find ways to improve service and demonstrate tangible results for their customers-while operating under increasingly tight resource constraints. Comparative performance measurement is a potentially powerful technique for motivating and facilitating changes that result in improved performance. It motivates organizations to pursue improvements by showing them what their peers have been able to achieve. It facilitates improvement by identifying specific best practices that have led to good results. Establishing comparable measures can take considerable effort, but pays off when participating organizations learn from practices employed by their peers to improve their own performance. Comparative performance measurement efforts also have the important effect of shining a spotlight on current approaches to show how data is tracked, how performance is measured, and how results are used. Participating agencies have an opportunity to examine the consistency and accuracy of their measurement practices, learn about differences in measurement across agencies, and work towards a greater degree of commonality.

This report presents results of the third in a series of comparative performance measurement efforts sponsored by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Standing Committee on Quality (SCOQ), Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Subcommittee. The purpose of these efforts is to identify states that have achieved exemplary performance, find out what practices have contributed to their success, and document these practices for the benefit of other states. This effort focuses on safety.