Work Zone Self Assessment
Self Assessment Results
The Work Zone Mobility and Safety Self Assessment (WZ SA) tool consists of a set of questions designed to assist those with work zone management responsibilities in assessing their programs, procedures, and practices against many of the good work zone practices in use today. The WZ SA consists of a Guide and a Score Sheet. The Guide describes how to conduct and score the WZ SA and delineates and explains the WZ SA questions. The score sheet can be used when conducting the self assessment, although the scores are eventually entered into an online system for calculation.
The WZ SA process fulfills a number of important goals:
- It helps raise the level of awareness of practices and strategies used in mitigating work zone congestion and crashes;
- It facilitates communication and sharing of best practices among transportation professionals;
- It serves as a working tool to identify gaps in existing efforts to mitigate work zone related congestion and crashes.
- It provides an opportunity to benchmark progress at the agency-level, and provides information to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) that can help in assessing the state of the practice in work zone management on a national basis.
- It assists FHWA in measuring the effectiveness of its National Work Zone Program and shaping the future direction of that program.
In addition, the WZ SA allows FHWA to measure progress in meeting the work zone objective of the Congestion Vital Few Goal.
Each FHWA Division works with their respective State to complete the WZSA each year, starting in 2003. A summary of the National results is available for each year, however individual State results are not available.
What Is the Vital Few?
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has identified three "Vital Few" priority areas to help focus the agency's activities. The three Vital Few Goal (VFG) areas are:
- Safety,
- Congestion Mitigation, and
- Environmental Stewardship & Streamlining.
These areas were selected through a highly collaborative Agency-wide process and represent FHWA's recognition that it must focus its resources wisely and for the greatest impact in areas where specific, critical performance gaps have been identified.
For each Vital Few Goal area, FHWA identified objectives, measures for gauging the achievement of those objectives, current "gaps" in achieving the objectives, and strategies that might be used by FHWA to meet the objectives. In this process, work zones were determined to be part of the Congestion Mitigation Vital Few Goal.
What is the Congestion Mitigation Vital Few Goal?
Simply put, congestion occurs when traffic demand exceeds available capacity. Congestion can be divided into recurring and non-recurring. Causes of recurring congestion include insufficient capacity, unrestrained demand, and ineffective management of capacity (e.g., poor signal timing). Causes of non-recurring congestion include work zones, incidents, weather events, special events, and emergencies. Total delay from all these causes is estimated to be about 5 billion hours per year.
FHWA determined that reducing work zone delay by aggressively anticipating and mitigating congestion caused by highway work zones would be one of the key objectives of the Congestion Vital Few Goal. The Work Zone Self Assessment tool was developed to measure progress for this objective.
In addition to the work zone objective, FHWA identified two additional objectives as part of the Vital Few Goal: reducing traffic incident delay and mitigating overall impacts of congestion through effective local partnerships.
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