Evaluation of the Every Day Counts Program (2025)
Chapter: 6 Conclusions
CHAPTER 6
Conclusions
This evaluation report presents evidence regarding the efficiency, implementation, effectiveness and attribution of the EDC Program, its outputs and outcomes, and some evidence suggesting the Program’s broader impacts. The EDC Program is an unusual undertaking, in that it focuses purely on the diffusion of Innovations with little attention to generating them. This is a critical element in bringing new techniques and technologies into practice, and the EDC Program illustrates why this is an important part of the technology life cycle.
Overall, key stakeholders and other indicators show that the EDC Program lives up to its goal of being a state-led program that identifies proven yet underutilized Innovations, and then promotes their implementation across the U.S. surface transportation sector. While rooted in the objective of accelerating project delivery, the program has expanded into new domains and new objectives. It remains consistent, however, in helping to accelerate Innovation deployment, and at least indirectly instill a culture of innovation in many state DOTs.
The diversity and range of the EDC Program complicated this evaluation study, necessitating a largely qualitative approach. With the evidence gathered, however, future evaluations could pursue more detailed assessments of program aspects, such as how to measure its true impact or how to model its approach to EDC Innovation diffusion. The reporting format and system for the EDC Program appears to be an element that stakeholders find most problematic. Rigorous evaluation techniques could help to inform the design of a new reporting system that captures the multiple effects of the EDC Innovations.
