Building on multimodal evaluation work conducted by EBP in the Michigan 2045 Long-Range Transportation Plan, the MMEBA project is developing a multimodal web-based software system to support Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) across its business units in conducting benefit-cost, economic impact, and multi-criteria assessments. 

The project included business-process design, software feature implementation, and training related to using an expanded TREDIS product for Michigan’s five-year program evaluation process and expanding other project and program economic analysis. The TREDIS tool provided a core benefit-cost and economic impact system with some new features to support MDOT. The MMEBA project also included custom development of aviation, transit, and active transportation evaluation tools.

The aviation tool converts a previous EBP product based in Access to provide MDOT data management capabilities as well as new data collection capabilities to collaborate with airport managers and sponsors around the state. It provides detailed scenario analysis across visitor spending, investment, and airport dependent employment analysis of dozens of Michigan airports roles in the local and state economy.

The transit tool leverages annually updated data from Michigan’s Public Transportation Information Management System to provide dozens of transit operators around the state access to off the shelf economic evaluation metrics as well as a suite of scenario planning tools to understand the economic and societal value of transit service. Individual agencies, groups of agencies, or the entire statewide system can be analyzed to understand their impact using compiled default factors that can provide performance and monetary metrics based on regularly collected data.

We provided detailed training and documentation, as well as localization, data integration templates, and guidance for leveraging the tool in the agency’s business processes. This project represents a major effort by MDOT to unify and coordinate its existing transportation economic and social benefit evaluation tools and processes within a coordinated multimodal suite of decision-support modules. The project involves not only detailed implementation of technical best practices, but intensive coordination across the agency regarding staff needs and use cases.

Beyond delivering assessment tools, a core element of this project is training of the agency on how to identify relevant input data from the agency’s internal modeling and system management systems, as well as how to integrate economic evaluation into planning processes. This project is illustrative of EBP’s work on methods for project evaluation and prioritization, which also includes Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, and California.

EBP will deliver MMEBA services to Michigan under an annual software subscription framework that provides the agency technical and business process support.