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Transportation projects in major metropolitan regions can vary widely in the types of benefits that they provide and in the scales of those benefits. Travel forecasting models and related procedures can provide reasonable estimates of those benefits, and many benefits can be distilled into equivalent monetary benefits by the use of consumer surplus or other valuation approaches. In theory, those methods could also be used to prioritize projects for funding consideration. However, an approach that simply chooses projects that provide the greatest net economic benefits may not result in a mix of projects that most effectively accomplishes broad regional goals. This paper describes an approach to project prioritization that was developed to support stakeholder-based weighting of multiple goals and, for each goal, multiple measures. The approach uses the analytic hierarchy approach to develop weights for each goal and a conjoint-based method to estimate stakeholder weights for each measure. The approach was applied as part of Washington State's Puget Sound Regional Council's Transportation 2040 process and achieved the goals in VISION 2040, the long-range land use plan. Weighting exercises were conducted with two stakeholder groups, and the results were applied to a set of proposed ferry, rail, highway, and local road projects. This paper describes the details of this case study and provides observations and conclusions from the work. The principal findings of the experiments were that statistically robust modeling conducted in real time during planning committee meetings can improve the transparency, equity, and collaboration of the project prioritization process.

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The Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) in Washington State has developed a set of procedures and methods for project and program evaluation that generally fall into the category of transportation benefit–cost analysis. The purpose of these methods is to be able to produce information about project or program performance relative to performance under a baseline set of conditions in which the project or program has not been implemented. PSRC used these benefit–cost analysis methods to develop and evaluate regional transportation planning alternatives during its most recent planning process. The creation of alternative regional transportation plans for analysis is not entirely unlike the development of investment portfolios. Acceptance of the findings of a comprehensive benefit–cost analysis as the appropriate analytical framework solves many, but not all, of the problems of practical implementation of a framework for evaluation of a scenario. Performance of a truly comprehensive benefit–cost analysis in a complex practical setting, however, introduces some empirical and policy challenges. PSRC has taken practical steps toward a more systematic approach to an alternative method of analysis. Incorporation of user benefit analysis into the process of evaluation of a scenario produces a natural shift toward consideration of development and selection of a scenario as an investment optimization problem. The paper explores additional approaches that might further advance the state of the practice in regional transportation planning.

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