Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization Pilot of the Data Business Plan for State and Local Departments of Transportation: Data Business Plan

Appendix K. Memorandum of Understanding—Regional Mobility Data Business Planning

Memorandum of Understanding

Regional Mobility Data Business Planning

To support regional transportation planning and performance monitoring needs, the Hillsborough Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) developed a Mobility Data Business Plan (DBP) to improve the sharing, integration, and management of regional travel mobility data (hereafter called “mobility data”). Mobility data is defined as traffic volume, speed, lane occupancy, or connected vehicle data for vehicle, freight, bicycle/pedestrian, and transit modes that is procured, collected, or managed by transportation agencies within the three core urban areas in the tri-county Tampa Bay region, which include Hillsborough, Pasco, and Pinellas counties.

In furtherance of this effort, this Agreement acknowledges the involvement and participation of regional stakeholder agencies in the data business planning process. The Mobility Data Business Plan recommended the following improvement strategies that regional stakeholder agencies should pursue:

1. Execute a Memorandum of Understanding to engage regional stakeholder agencies in the DBP implementation process.
2. Obtain regional coordination and buy-in:
   1. Engage regional stakeholder agencies in a data sharing agreement.
   2. Implement a data governance framework.
   3. Develop and publish a data catalog.
   4. Conduct an annual review of regional mobility data programs.
   5. Develop contract language for vendors to ensure regional data sharing.
3. Improve data integration and collaboration:
   1. Address needs for data sharing.
   2. Address data security and privacy issues.
4. Build a data sharing platform:
   1. Publish the data catalog on a wiki or Web site.
   2. Adopt open data format for data sharing.
   3. Address governance needs.
   4. Address data collection and integration needs.
   5. Develop a data warehouse with classification system and querying capabilities.
5. Implement performance measures to track success.

The ultimate objective of the Data Business Plan is to develop an open data sharing platform for regional stakeholder agency staff and other users to request and/or access data for operations, planning, project prioritization, asset management, GIS/spatial analysis, and performance management activities.

It is anticipated that the data business plan will help local partners understand what mobility data is being collected within their organizations and at the regional level, how the data could be used to support transportation planning activities, and who is responsible for managing/updating the data. Having organized, well understood data will help reduce the amount of time staff spend obtaining data from other agencies, as well as help identify duplicative data collection/procurement effort, leading to more rapid, targeted data acquisitions in the future. Another benefit is that it can then be used to support transportation decisionmaking and better inform whether specific operational practices are having an intended system-wide effect.

Approval

By signing this Agreement, each member agency agrees to participate in the Mobility Data Business Plan implementation process.

Agreed to by: