Sponsor: Federal Transit Administration
Performance Period: January 2016 – June 2025
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Safety Research and Demonstration (SRD) Program is part of a larger safety research effort at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) that provides technical and financial support for transit agencies to pursue innovative approaches to eliminate or mitigate safety hazards. In 2016, FTA’s Office of Research, Demonstration, and Innovation, released a notice of funding availability soliciting project proposals to demonstrate innovative technologies and safer designs to improve public transportation safety.
FTA tasked CUTR with conducting the independent evaluation of the SRD grant program. Research activities require close coordination and ongoing interaction with the transit agencies serving as SRD sites to perform data collection and analysis of deployment data for the purpose of tracking those performance measures. The project team will also actively support FTA in future SRD project solicitations, specifically assisting with the development of standard performance metrics that must be observed with associated data collection requirements based on the specific technologies being deployed.