Efficiency benchmarking framework for highway patrol agencies and implementation for the Wyoming highway patrol

Abstract

With many lives lost every year in crashes, highway traffic safety is a major concern. With 93% of crashes being contributed to by roadway users' poor behaviors, one of the most effective ways to improve highway traffic safety is to improve the performance of organizations enforcing traffic laws to change those poor behaviors. This research introduces a framework that makes it possible to benchmark the efficiency performance within the highway patrol. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), a mathematical methodology based on the concepts of optimization and linear programming, was used to develop that framework to measure the efficiency performance of a highway patrol's divisions. Such framework is used to measure and compare the efficiency performance of 17 divisions of the Wyoming Highway Patrol to allow internal benchmarking and thus to improve the overall organizational performance. The concepts discussed in this paper can be implemented by highway patrol agencies for internal and external efficiency benchmarking. Although DEA has been utilized for organizational performance evaluation in multiple sectors, literature review to date has not identified any study that has specifically utilized DEA in the context of highway traffic safety from the highway patrol's perspective. As such, this study is original and timely.