TravInfo Field Operational Test Institutional Evaluation Final Results

Problem

TravInfo is a regional traveler information system in the San Francisco Bay Area. The goal of TravInfo was to broadly disseminate accurate, comprehensive, timely, and reliable information on traffic conditions and multi-modal travel options to the public in the Bay Area through a public-private partnership.

The institutional evaluation of TravInfo was one of four test elements which comprised the TravInfo Field Operational Test (FOT). The other elements were technology assessment, traveler response, and transportation network performance. The transportation network performance test was not performed because of the lack of traffic data to realistically measure the changes in traffic flow during the field test.

The institutional evaluation measured the performance of TranInfo's public-private partnership at the organizational level. It examined how well TravInfo's institutional organization worked to achieve its objectives, what benefits the project partners were able to gain from the field test, and what institutional challenges they had to overcome.

Findings

TravInfo's organizational structure was unique, with a high degree of openness in the public-private partnership. TravInfo meetings were conducted as open forums to encourage the entrepreneurial participation of the advanced traveler information industry as well as the active participation of local public agencies. The ultimate responsibility for TravInfo lay with the public sector in the form of the Management Board, the members of which came from regional transportation agencies.

The TravInfo organization was effective in appropriately utilizing public and private sector talent. By placing the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is the transportation planning organization for the nine-county Bay Area, in a leadership role, the project recognized the importance of consensus building.

The project helped foster constructive relationships among the projects principal public participants. The project also fostered alliances among many of the private participants.

The project also encountered many challenges. Two major setbacks were insufficient coverage of the Bay Area transportation network by the data supplied to the TravInfo Traveler Information Center (TIC) and an inefficient system design that required the TIC to be considerably more dependent on manual operations than expected.