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The 2012 transportation reauthorization (MAP-21) was a huge disappointment overall, but it did contain a modest attempt to improve accountability by creating a new system of performance measures to guide future transportation investments. A majority of the data in the State of the System comes from this system that USDOT (very) slowly put in place over the last decade.

As with most transportation reauthorizations, the disappointing MAP-21 two-year law was approved by a strong bipartisan majority in both chambers in 2012. One of the few positives in the law was a bit of a trade: States got more flexibility over the use of federal transportation funds in exchange for orienting the program around core national transportation goals and increasing accountability and transparency. 

Congress wrote seven national goals into that 2012 law, directing USDOT to come up with new rules for measuring, assessing, and then reporting on targets for: safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and better project delivery.  MAP-21 called for states to set targets under specific measures by 2014 for:

  • Interstate highway performance, measured as traffic reliability
  • National Highway System (NHS) performance, excluding Interstates, measured as traffic reliability
  • Interstate pavement condition
  • NHS pavement condition
  • NHS bridge condition
  • Fatalities and injuries per vehicle mile traveled
  • Number of fatalities and injuries
  • Number of vulnerable road user fatalities and serious injuries
  • Metropolitan congestion
  • On-road “mobile source” emissions
  • Freight movement on Interstate highways, measured as truck traffic reliability
  • Transit safety
  • Transit state of repair

USDOT didn’t come close to finishing this system by the 2014 deadline set in MAP-21 and many individual measures were not finalized until well into 2017, including the rule for measuring congestion. And the proposed greenhouse gas rule for tracking and measuring on-road emissions was abandoned during the first Trump administration, restored by Biden’s USDOT in 2022 after an inexplicable two years of inaction, and withdrawn again in Trump’s second term.

By 2017, states were required to start setting specific targets for these areas and then report on their performance at regular intervals. For safety, targets were annual.  In 2017, states had to set specific targets for traffic fatalities and serious injuries in 2018 (among other measures) and then monitor and report on their progress. For the other measures, targets must be set every four years with a 2-year interim check-in.

Shortcomings with the performance management system

The best way to describe this new performance management system overall is that maybe hearts were in the right place, but the execution has radically failed to deliver on the promises made by Congress back in 2012.

1) There are no substantial penalties for missing your targets, nor rewards for performing well.
A truly performance-based system focused on accomplishing measurable things with the $60 billion-plus we spend each year would both penalize states and regions with terrible performance or partner with them to refocus their spending and project development process to produce the results they are seeking. Such a process would also reward those that set ambitious targets and make progress towards them. This system does neither.

In most cases, “the program neither rewards nor penalizes states and regions for their progress toward the performance targets they set,” we wrote in our guide to MAP-21. The only penalties for failing to meet your targets are best described as mild to non-existent. The penalty for missing your safety and state of repair targets is losing a modest amount of flexibility over federal transportation funding and being required to spend slightly more funding on safety. (Though the way that “more spending on safety” is defined and executed, it won’t necessarily produce any better results either.) No overall loss of federal funds, no reduction in the federal cost share, no penalties that would lead to changing the status quo.

There are also no rewards for performing well. Rewards could have taken the form of bonus funding, new flexibility, or extra points on applications when applying for competitive grants OR perhaps even new grant programs or funding specifically only for states/metros that set ambitious targets AND meet those targets.

2) There are no penalties for setting negative targets, i.e., aiming for things to get worse tomorrow than they are today. 
There’s not much else to say that the safety story above doesn’t already make clear: It’s frankly pretty wild that any state can just set a target for more people to get killed on their roadways, as if they aren’t the ones who have the money and power to improve it. States with terrible road and bridge conditions can set targets for all of those things to get worse. There are no penalties, and honestly, it’s so hard for the public to find this data that doing so doesn’t even really come with a negative PR hit.

3) The performance measures are too limited.
The current 7 goals and 13 measures only address four areas: 1) safety, 2) system condition, 3) emissions and 4) traffic movement. Traffic movement is measured several different ways (ie, reliability, truck reliability and congestion) all of which are focused on the speed of vehicles but have little to do with saving people time. In fact, the way we get vehicles moving often forces people to travel farther and/or cuts off routes to others, costing people time. This approach might have made sense in the mid-20th Century when we were building limited access highways and had access to less data, but it is 75 years later. Time to move into the modern times. 

Now we have much more information and many tools to use. We should measure outcomes, like what investments will lower household transportation costs, improve access to jobs, and support local businesses.

4) Lastly, this program fails to prioritize true transparency for taxpayers — it’s simply too hard to evaluate performance.
FHWA did build a new performance management website to provide the public with data on the overall conditions of the transportation system, the goals states were setting, and the resulting trends. But the clunky dashboard and overall system fail to:

  • Make clear which states are failing to meet their targets or setting targets that make sense.
  • Create dashboards that are easier for the public to use and understand—theirs are pretty opaque and fragmented.
  • Relate spending to performance to explain what is happening and why. E.g., showing a state is spending as much on new road capacity as repairing existing roads might struggle to reach their roadway condition targets. a state is spending on new road capacity vs. other modes, juxtaposed with their record on safety. 

Basic spending data reported to FHWA is also painfully slow to reach the public. Even now, as you explore the State of the System data hub, you will see that data for recent years is often missing. We are contemplating the end of the IIJA in 2026 and its successor legislation, and yet we still don’t have a complete picture of where the money from the previous authorization (The FAST Act)  went and what it accomplished.  Even when data are available, they are often incomplete or reported using different metrics than other related data (eg, county v MSA or lane miles v centerlane miles). All of this makes understanding and accountability difficult.

Addressing these problems and providing true transparency and accountability are one of our core motivations for producing the State of the System. It isn’t perfect, but we will be iterating and improving on it and plan to add any useful new data that we can find. 

We invite you to provide us with feedback or partner with us to make it better. We also hope you will share it widely with transportation agencies, elected officials, stakeholders and the press. It is time the people paying for the transportation system learn what they are (and are not) getting for their investment.

Dive into the State of the System data hub