What Measures To Use | What The Measures Are| How they will be used

Evaluation Measures

What Measures To Use

Evaluation of the strategies in the Community-based Transportation Planning Model that will be used prior to and during the TIP process will be an important factor in their continued use. The difficulty of evaluating the strategies, as discussed at the Joint Dialogue Session, would be in identifying measures for success. The participants in the dialogue session suggested that some of the evaluation factors should be subjective; others may be more precise and numeric. They should reflect qualitative measures as well as quantitative measures and provide feedback for making improvements as well as tell us what succeeded. The following suggestions were made at the Joint Dialogue Session as ways to measure participation/success:

• Number of people participating in the process from the target area
• Return participation from one year to the next by individuals
• Maintaining continued contact with staff
• Collecting anecdotes about people’s experience with the process, and how they feel about spending their time with the process as well as how the money is spent.
• Whether or not a project got funded
• There may be a need to establish one set of criteria for success as seen by the community and another as seen by the agency.

Consequently, after several meetings of a subcommittee designated to work out some of the initial measures, the SOC approved a combination of anecdotal information and numeric measures intended to determine the success of the different strategies contained in the model. As the measures were discussed, it became apparent that some of the objectives needed to be modified to recognize the situation(s) at play in the community.

One example was the objective of increasing funded projects proposed by the community from the target area. The City of San Antonio currently selects projects for the TIP so that they are distributed roughly evenly throughout the ten City Council districts of the city. Consequently, there was no way to assure that projects in the target area proposed by the community members would be the ones that were funded. While the City staff was willing to do as much as possible to recognize projects proposed by the community, they were reluctant to make this a measure of success.