Performance management is increasingly emphasized at the state and national levels. This is evident in the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) and performance targets set by individual state Departments of Transportation (DOTs). This management approach requires the establishment of performance goals, measures, metrics for pavement networks, and systematic measurement of progress towards achieving these goals. MAP-21 and individual state DOTs use multiple metrics for assessing the performance of pavement networks. This thesis applies different performance criteria to the roadway network in Texas to determine the degree of consistency among the performance metrics used by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and MAP-21. Statistical tests are used to compare different sets of results in order to determine if significant differences exist between these metrics, namely the International Roughness Index (IRI), and TxDOT's Condition Score (CS) and Distress Score (DS). The results of this research indicate that urban roads had significantly and consistently higher IRI than rural roads throughout the past nine years. However, the DS and CS data do not provide strong evidence to support the idea that rural and urban pavements perform. The results indicate that the three metrics agreed about 22 percent of the time when comparing pavement performance in rural and urban areas. Similar results were obtained when comparing different pavement types. When comparing two pavement types (ACP and CRCP), the IRI data yielded that CRCP roads had significantly and consistently higher IRI than ACP roads throughout the past nine years. However, the DS and CS data do not provide strong evidence to support this idea. The three metrics agreed 30 percent of the time when comparing the performance of CRCP and ACP on a year-by-year basis. Additionally, statistical correlation models were developed to derive IRI threshold values consistent with the existing threshold values for CS and DS. The study area consists of the Houston district of TxDOT. The Houston district was selected for conducting this study because it includes both urban and rural areas and it includes different pavement types. This network consists of 2,386 lane-miles of urban roads and 1,571 lane-miles of rural roads. The data for conducting this research was obtained from TxDOT's Pavement Management Information System (PMIS) database.
