Meet the Transportation Dashboard

By Steve Poftak
January 24th, 2012

How well did the Patriots do this weekend? That’s easy. Look at the scoreboard.

How well has the state spent your tax dollars since the enactment of transportation reform? Well, that’s harder. There’s some reports that highlight the changes in management structure and some of the cost savings.

But what about the things that really matter to the customer. Some of those measures are in a .pdf file on the MassDOT website, if you know where to look. (And the MBTA actually is a bit more forward with their data.)

Pioneer thinks something bolder, more public, and customer-focused is needed. Using simple desktop tools, we put together a transportation dashboard with public data. It’s far from perfect, but we hope its starts a conversation about what’s important to us in the transportation system and how the system is performing. If we expect to have an ‘adult conversation’ about new revenues, that conversation needs to start with a critical assessment of how we are spending our current resources and what impact it has had. Take a look at the dashboard on our website (where you can examine backing data) or take a look at the snapshot below. Let us know what you think.