International Journey Time Benchmarking: Strategic Road Networks

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is the monitor of Highways England and its management of the Strategic Road Network (SRN) - the motorways and main 'A' roads in England. We are here to ensure that the network is managed to deliver performance, including efficiency, safety, and sustainability, for the benefit of road users and the public. Our monitoring role involves assessing Highways England's performance against the requirements in the Road Investment Strategy (RIS), and its compliance with a wide range of requirements in the Licence under which it operates.

The ORR Highways Directorate is responsible for monitoring and enforcing the performance and efficiency of Highways England. As part of our role, we monitor Highways England's performance against a set of 11 key performance indicators (KPIs), which are outlined in the Road Investment Strategy.

Highways England's KPIs do not all have set quantitative targets. For example, KPI4 (average delays - time lost per vehicle mile) relates to the outcome area of encouraging economic growth and is a metric with no target. The main outcome for this metric is to encourage economic growth by facilitating the movement of people and goods or services across the country as quickly as possible on the SRN.

A recent joint piece of research with Transport Focus (see link, see p. 3) shows that journey time is the main priority for road users when asked to consider Highways England's performance specification. The same research also found that users perceive targets as important in demonstrating a commitment to improve performance. Our recent December 2016 Benchmarking Progress Report (see link) compared performance regionally and found that there is a negative correlation between journey time satisfaction and average delays on the SRN.

As well as not demonstrating a commitment to users to improve performance, the lack of a target for KPI4 makes it difficult for us to objectively and independently understand how well or poorly the company is performing. Benchmarking performance on similar road networks in other countries (see Table 1 below) is one way we can increase our capacity to judge Highways England's performance on KPI4.

Highway England is currently in the process of developing future performance metrics which it will propose to the Department for Transport (DfT) for use from 2020. Further insight into their performance on journey time reliability will also help us to contribute to that discussion. We will give advice to DfT in relation to the second Road Investment Strategy (RIS2), 2020-25, within the next year.

This project should inform our monitoring of KPI4 (average delays) and enable us to compare how well Highways England is performing, relative to comparable SRNs managed by national road authorities.

Additional information: The tender closes on 17/07/2017 at 12pm. All communication must be via our portal.