In 1998 the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Office of Program Quality Coordination conducted a quality improvement review entitled Meeting the Customer’s Needs for Mobility and Safety During Construction and Maintenance Operations. Part of this review was the completion of a Work Zone Baseline Assessment Data Form by all FHWA field offices. The primary purpose of the Baseline Assessment Data Form was to provide the field offices with a tool to evaluate their past work zone activities, establish a baseline of their current state of the practice, and provide input for their future work zone quality improvement efforts. A second purpose of the baseline was to develop a summary of strengths, improvement opportunities, and obstacles to continuous quality improvement. The results of the baseline provided critical guidance and focus to the FHWA to support setting specific goals and objectives to provide tools, training, and best practice guidance to FHWA field offices and our state partners to help them accomplish their goals of reducing congestion and crashes due to work zones. In the fall of 2002, the FHWA taking lessons learned from the previous assessment tool, developed an updated version of the Work Zone Baseline Assessment data form to establish a new work zone baseline. This new Work Zone Mobility and Safety Self-Assessment survey contained 46 questions divided into the following six sections: 1) Leadership and Policy; 2) Project Planning and Programming; 3) Project Design; 4) Project Construction and Operations; 5) Communications and Training; and 6) Program Evaluation. Each FHWA Division Office was asked to complete the survey with assistance from the appropriate transportation agency staff. The completion of the survey was envisioned to be a group exercise. In many cases, several meetings between transportation agency and Division Office staff were conducted to arrive at a response that best reflected transportation agency policies, practices and procedures. (Author/publisher)
Abstract