Promising Practices: Transit Technology Adoption Methodology for Identifying and Profiling Promising Practices

The identification and selection of promising practices followed a three-step process. The first step was a desk review to identify practices that may warrant inclusion in the Guidebook. This review included recent Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) reports, a review of Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Mobility On Demand grant awards, information on the Institute of Transportation Engineers and Intelligent Transportation Systems America websites, and resources from the Shared-Use Mobility Center, the National Center for Mobility Management, the Rural Health Information Hub, National Rural Transit Assistance Program, and Transport Research International Documentation. An initial list of practices was identified, some already in place in rural, small-urban, or tribal transit agencies, others that show potential to be adopted in these operating contexts.

Once a comprehensive list of practices was identified, indicators and a matrix were used to select the promising practices that would be profiled in this Guidebook. A set of eight indicators was used to evaluate each of the initially chosen practices to help determine the qualities that make a practice promising. These indicators were broad enough to assess a wide variety of practices and are shown in Figure 1. The third and final step in the identification and selection process was to use a matrix to evaluate promising practices based on their performance for each one of the proposed indicators. The results of that analysis guided the selection of the promising practices profiled in this Guidebook.

Figure 1. Set of Indicators of “Promising Practices”:

• Innovativeness
• Replicability/Scalability
• Cost-Effectiveness
• Customer Usability
• Operational/Organizational Efficiency
• Impact on Performance Measures
• Risk/ Barriers
• Lifecycle/Sustainability

After collecting, organizing, and synthesizing available information, in-depth interviews with the staff leading these practices at agencies, organizations, or other partners were conducted to produce a profile of each promising practice (a complete list of interviewees can be found at the end of this document). The goal of the profiles is to describe how promising practices were developed, scaled, and evaluated, and to document lessons learned in the implementation process.