Evaluation of Project Development Process at State Transportation Agencies

In the United States, transportation agencies across the country are increasingly challenged to deliver projects with greater speed and efficiency. This study evaluated the comprehensiveness of the project development process (PDP) adopted by different states. The authors excluded 10 states from their study because of the lack of available online data. The authors developed a three-step method to assess a PDP’s comprehensiveness, which was informed by reviewing each state’s PDP and related literature. The authors then developed a series of criteria for assessing the comprehensiveness of the PDPs of 40 state Departments of Transportation (DOTs), which was used to amass and analyze that multi-state information to explore individual PDP variations and comprehensiveness. Data analysis indicated a wide variance from state to state in each criterion’s comprehensiveness with a similar comprehensiveness characterizing the PDPs in 20 states. Additionally, the authors conducted an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to weight the criteria and rank PDP’s comprehensiveness. Through the AHP, PDP components relating to the process were determined as the most important criterion in the hierarchy. Environmental studies/documentation/permits, the number of tasks in PDP flowcharts, and value engineering had the highest weight among the sub-criteria of the PDP components, PDP flowchart, and other improvements, respectively. A case study that produced a list of rankings of the state’s PDP’s comprehensiveness was presented to demonstrate how the evaluation method works. The first five states identified through the AHP were Wisconsin, California, Michigan, Florida, and Georgia.