The National Center for Mobility Management has developed a technology typology for mobility management. The goal is to give mobility managers a framework for understanding, comparing, and evaluating the value of the many different types of technology available in the public transportation sector.
Watch our explainer video on the Technology Typology:
The typology is organized as a matrix with columns that cover the main technology areas for the industry and with rows that roughly show how much the technology represents the emerging best practices of scalability and platform accessibility. By clicking on each cell in the matrix, you can see more details about each type of technology, described along the following dimensions:
- Scalability: how well does the technology type keep up and stay relevant as an agency grows in its needs?
- Platform accessibility: how much capacity is there to integrate and exchange data with other systems through a documented system-to-system interface? This particular type of accessibility refers to the ease of access between technology systems and not should not be confused with the people-to-infrastructure meaning of accessibility commonly used in the mobility field.
- Ease of implementation: can an agency set this category of tools up themselves? If external resources are needed, what kind and how much?
- Relative affordability: roughly how affordable is the solution compared to other options?
- Maturity: how "fully baked" is this kind of solution? How much risk is there that a solution might not work well because the vendor has not worked out all the kinks?
- Generalizability: How confident can an agency be that the solution will "just work" out of the box without significant up-front investment to configure the tool or alter agency workflows? The more reliant a system is on certain conditions for it to be useful, the less generalizable it is.
Each dimension has a rating on a five-point scale. Because of the breadth of each type, these ratings are approximate only. The goal is not precision but rather to give the reader a general sense of where to position a given technology type compared to others.
The typology is a work in progress, so please do not hesitate to send feedback to technologist@nc4mm.org. (Vers. 2, 5/15/20)
Click on a cell to see details about it below the matrix.