GDOT Driver Information Services: TSG Study of Perceived Value Yields Surprises

To invest tax dollars wisely, every governmental agency needs to understand how the public values its services. Finding out can be tricky, especially if such services are part of daily routines like driving to and from work.

Real-time traffic and road condition information reaches metro Atlanta drivers through Georgia Department of Transportation information services: overhead message boards, 511 call-in and the Georgia Navigator web site. Since 2002, GDOT has relied on The Schapiro Group (TSG) to track trends in usage and public satisfaction.

In the latest round of research, TSG dug deeper than ever to gauge perception of benefits. “If you can make a quick decision that gets you to work on time, or to pick up your child from day care, the public appreciates this,” says Anthony Bradford, who manages the GDOT Transportation Management Center where information services are developed and maintained. But how does this appreciation equate to hard value? This was TSG’s challenge.

“We got consumers to tell us”
Capturing and analyzing what is hard to measure is a TSG specialty. Applying this expertise for GDOT led to a surprising discovery. Drivers who use these information systems perceive higher savings in fuel, time and money than even GDOT’s own engineering studies have documented. The implications are significant for GDOT’s overall traffic mitigation strategy, and for marketing these services to expand their use.

“The value of Schapiro’s work has been incredible,” says Jon Ringler of Serco, the firm which operates the Traffic Management Center. He notes that the public’s valuation of benefits from GDOT information systems is twice as high in some cases as analytical models reflect. “We spend a lot of money creating and publicizing the engineering findings, and they don’t make a lot of impact,” he says. “So we’ve changed the paradigm and started by asking transportation customers what they think, and the results are significantly greater.”

Taking an ROI approach
According to Alex Trouteaud, Senior Strategist for TSG, “Our approach was to look at this from the standpoint of what taxpayers and consumers feel they are getting as a return on investment. What we needed was a practical way to ask, ‘Are these information systems a good way to invest your tax dollars?’”

The solution was to pose a series of straightforward questions about the extra time drivers thought they would be in the car if they had no real-time traffic updates. The questions covered radio traffic reports as well as GDOT information services. Bottom line, respondents estimated they would spend up to 26% more time a day behind the wheel if they lacked advance information about traffic flow.

Time saved is just the start
From this key piece of data, TSG projected how the public’s view of traffic information services translates into multiple forms of savings:

• A metro Atlanta driver who cuts travel time by 26% a day saves, on average, 1-2 gallons of gas a week based on respondents’ reports of their own gas mileage. Calculated by Q3 2008 gas prices, this equals savings of $400-plus a year.
• On a metro-wide basis, a 26% reduction in driving time can eliminate more than 2 billion pounds of carbon emissions over the course of a year.
• The average driver estimates he or she spends 2.2 hours less per work week behind the wheel by using information systems. If all of this reduced driving was concentrated into a single rush hour span, the effect on congestion would be 737,000 fewer vehicle trips during that rush hour.
• Using National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, 26% less driving time across metro Atlanta projects to 200 fewer car crashes a year and 100 fewer injuries.

For GDOT, these findings by TSG point toward a new marketing strategy of high potential. In addition to the weight of engineering findings, opinions and experiences of existing users add validation from the drivers’ point of view. For state policy makers and budgeters, the net effect is that taxpayers are saying, “This works for me.”

Says Bradford, “The Schapiro Group gave us some really good, tangible deliverables that have helped us make adjustments and identify needs and opportunities we might not have thought of. They are stellar to work with.”

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