Roads & Transportation: Metrics, Monitoring and Efficiency
The history of roads (or paved streets) dates back to 4000 B.C in the cities of Indus Valley Civilization. And the history of wheeled transport dates back to 5000 B.C in ancient city of Sumer in Mesopotamia. When I contemplate on the question, ‘Why did roads emerge in the first place?’, the answer is straight forward to me, ‘To Move People’. When I ask the question, ‘What can be deemed as progress in terms of Road Transportation?’; I would expect to get a variety of answers, say, “To move people faster” or “To move people more comfortably” or “To move more people”. On careful observation, we would find that ‘progress’ is either a zero to one step forward or a betterment from a previous state.
In the 21st century we see a huge emphasis on the measurement of this progress by what we call as ‘Metrics’. Business’ in this era are obsessed with Metrics, questions like ‘How did the company perform in Q3 compared to the Q2?’, ‘What was the YoY growth of revenues?’ are commonplace in a business scenario. But the key always lies in analyzing the right metrics and prioritizing one over the other. The businesses have enough experts to identify the right metrics for a company and help them progress.
What about the governments and especially the Roads & Transportation sector?
Roads & Transportation falls under the jurisdiction of different entities of the government in different parts of the world. In New York, functions like the road infrastructure, signalization & traffic monitoring fall under the purview of NYC’s Dept. of Transportation, whereas the enforcement of traffic rules falls under NYPD. Considering Bangalore, India; the road infrastructure is taken care of by the Roads & Buildings department, whereas the signalization, traffic monitoring & enforcement of traffic rules falls under the purview of Bangalore City Police. In case of Singapore; the road infrastructure, Intelligent Transportation systems, Communication systems, Traffic monitoring and automated enforcement systems are all handled by the Land Transport Authority, whereas only the enforcement of rules or violations is handled by the Singapore Police.
It can be inferred that the operational structure is not similar across all the cities in the world and that makes it is hard to find a standard set of metrics to measure progress. With the involvement of multiple stake holders comes the complexity of making real progress. But if the governments across the world were go back to the drawing board and ask the fundamental question, ‘Why do we have roads?’ and ‘What do we consider as progress?’. We might end up with simple answers like, ‘We need to move people’ and ‘We need to move more number of people on the existing infrastructure’
I once read somewhere that, as of 2014 the estimated average speed of vehicles in Bangalore is about 9–10 kmph where as in Singapore it was ~29 kmph. It is easy to for people argue that Singapore has more spacious roads and hence the high average speed. But when we make a direct comparison between the average volumes of traffic carried by similar section of roads, we may understand that the efficiency factor is quite low in case of Bangalore. When we dig deeper into the factors contributing to this low efficiency, we may find reasons like improper signage’s, potholes, lack of efficient enforcement, lack of signal optimization etc. All these do not fall under the purview of one department and it needs collaborative effort to solve them.
The key to solving any problem would be to first identify the problem. Defining the right metrics both at an intra-organizational level and inter-organizational level would be the way to identify the problems. Living in the age of data, we now have the availability of systems that can help us quantify these metrics and monitor them to understand the progress.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_road_transport
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Transport_Authority
