The literature review for this research effort focused on identifying literature pertaining to the costs and benefits of collecting data.  This extensive search looked at sources both within the transportation industry and expanded to fields outside of transportation including forestry, medicine and health, ecology, water resources, and mining.  Literature from these fields was reviewed for any pertinent methodologies or findings that could be helpful to this research effort.  The findings from the review were used to help develop a methodology for conducting a market analysis of the cost and benefits of collecting roadway data to improve highway safety.  Most of the literature did not contain information directly relevant to developing a methodology for this type of cost-benefit analysis; however, there were a few resources that provided useful information, and these are summarized in the following paragraphs.

The Colorado DOT conducted a study evaluating the statewide economic benefits of future transportation investments.  The research investigated the benefits of additional transportation spending above what is needed to maintain current transportation performance levels.  The researchers were able to quantify certain benefits related to transportation improvements, including reduced congestion, pavement quality, safety improvements, and general system improvements.  Other benefits (e.g., quality of life, new jobs, and better access to recreation) that they were unable to quantify for the economic analysis were still determined to have a positive impact (8).

Several reports provided information on the cost of collecting roadway data.  A 1998 report from the FHWA investigated the cost and quality issues associated with collecting and managing highway safety data (9).  In 2009, a North Carolina DOT research effort collected asset management data on 95 miles of roadway to determine the capabilities and limitations of automated roadway data collection systems.  Various vendors were used to collect a sampling of pavement, roadside, geotechnical, and bridge elements (10).  In a similar effort, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Strategic Highway Safety Research Program (SHRP2) conducted a roadway data collection “rodeo” where vendors used mobile data collection units to collect over 100 roadway data elements. Information from the vendors who participated in both of these data collection efforts was used to help develop cost estimates for the market analysis (11).

A recent study by Li et al. presents a methodology for a benefit-cost analysis of improving highway segment safety hardware over its life cycle.  The researchers established a safety index by assessing the risk of vehicle crashes with safety-related attributes on the roadway segment.  An annual potential for safety improvements associated with improvements to the hardware was calculated and compared to the number of collisions on the segment with and without hardware upgrades.  The methodology outlined in this report relies on a sufficient amount of historical data, including vehicle crashes, highway system preservation, traffic operations, and expenditures, as well as data processing and analysis capabilities.  This methodology was too specific for the purpose of developing this market analysis but presented a vision on how future data efforts could be quantified, comparing locations without data and locations with data (12).

A full list of all of the literature reviewed for this project, including a brief summary of each resource, can be found in Appendix A.