Procurement Case Study: MnDOT ¶
In October 2020, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) started its procurement process for a technology vendor for its regional Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) pilot, awarded under the Federal Transit Administration’s Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) grant program. The project called for a data sharing platform built on an open architecture and using existing and emerging data standards to allow both project and third-party software providers access to transit and shared mobility provider data.
MnDOT partnered with the Minnesota Information Technology Department (MNIT) to develop a technology RFP that called for the creation of a MaaS data sharing platform, transit data feed developer, trip planner, payment system integrated within the trip planner, and a demand response booking portal integrated in the trip planner. Because no one technology company provides all of these services, MnDOT encouraged responses made up of a team of technology providers, with a prime contractor and other project partners as subcontractors.
In order to ensure maximum data interoperability, MnDOT asked RFP respondents to implement current data standards as well as emerging specifications with potential to be adopted by the broader transit industry as data standards. Existing data standards included the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS). Use of provisional or experimental specifications included GFTS-Flex to describe flexible services like demand response and deviated route and GTFS-OnDemand (also called GOFS) to describe on-demand services like taxis, ride-hail, and microtransit services.
Projects that can include experimental or provisional specifications help move the transit industry towards more data interoperability. Incorporating emerging specifications as a project data standard is an important step towards standards adoption, as example implementation cases are needed to prove specifications utility ahead of broader acceptance. For example, MnDOT’s use of GTFS-Flex on this project by data producers (13 partner agencies) and consumers (Transit app and MnDOT’s web-based trip planner) provided MobilityData, the steward of GTFS, the required use case to call a vote to adopt the Flex extension as part of GTFS. GTFS-Flex was officially adopted as part of GTFS in March 2023.
You can download and review MnDOT’s Mobility-as-a-Service RFP and Functional Requirements below: