MSU receives $107K grant from MDOT to assess the condition of Michigan’s public transit system

Heidi Macwan -

Last month, the MSU Urban & Regional Planning Program received funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation's Office of Passenger Transportation to assess the condition of Michigan's transit system.

CATA bus riders getting on buses at transit station. Photo by MSU CABS.

Last month, the Michigan State University (MSU) Urban & Regional Planning Program received funding from the Michigan Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) Office of Passenger Transportation to assess the condition of Michigan’s transit system with the help of Michigan’s 79 transit agencies.

The purpose of this $107K grant is to extend the current study, “Measuring and Reporting Michigan’s Transit System Condition,” through 2018.

Under continued guidance from Associate Professor Eva Kassens-Noor and Assistant Professor Zeenat Kotval-Karamchandani, the team will move ahead with updating the current survey on an annual basis based on feedback from Michigan’s transit agencies, in partnership with the two state associations, Michigan Association of Transportation Systems (MASSTrans) and the Michigan Public Transit Association (MPTA).

This survey focuses on measuring 79 Michigan transit agencies against 11 system-wide MDOT goals, and benchmarking these goals against best practices in the global transit industry. The MDOT intends to further improve the condition of Michigan’s state-wide system, which the agency has been pursuing successfully over the past three years.

Over the course of the project, the team intends to infuse the latest academic knowledge in data measurement and collection, while closely following MDOT’s directive in “developing, refining and implementing an annual data collection reporting process, from data collection to reporting, and continual evaluation and implementation.”

For more information about this project, please contact Dr. Eva Kassens-Noor at ekn@msu.edu.

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