Multimodal Access for All Travelers (MAT) Standards

The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) along with their standards development partners have worked on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) standards since the inception of the ITS Standards Program over 20 years ago. In recent years traditional ITS technologies have been a key enabler supporting the integration of multimodal and emerging transportation modes with more established forms of public sector transportation. Multimodal Access for All Travelers (MAT) use cases and systems tend to incorporate a wide range of transportation options and modes including but not limited to active transportation (e.g., walking, rolling, bicycling), shared modes (e.g., bike share, car share, ride share) and other mobility services (e.g., automated shuttles), which tend to utilize the roadways and public ways (i.e., sidewalks, bike paths) but in a manner that could expose travelers to safety risks. This project’s goal is to address ongoing convergence of ITS technologies with multimodal transportation through the development of standards that facilitate integration of new innovative forms of MAT.

This project was initiated by USDOT efforts to understand the gaps in supporting mobility devices and service innovation with technology and data standards. USDOT previously had a MAT Standards project that produced a MAT Standards Gap Analysis and Cybersecurity Coordination Plan which this project is expected to build on. A necessary step for the USDOT and ITE is to work with the multimodal community to survey existing and future standards that support ongoing economic development and deployment of ITS implementations for all travelers. In addition, one of the critical objectives of the standard development activities is to ensure that the security needs of the multimodal transportation system and safety of travelers are addressed in both standards development and ITS deployments.

To that end, project tasks will plan for and execute the development of critical standards, where gaps exist, with a focus on ensuring interoperability to make MAT experience seamless and secure for users.

The ITE role in MAT development has spanned many years since 2021 to today. The effort includes several phases:

Phase 1: Gap and Priority Standards (Oct 2021 - Oct 2023)

This phase consisted of a survey of MAT standards and key stakeholders associated with the gaps, collection and aggregation of use cases, and MAT readiness assessment rubric.

Phase 2: Standards Action Planning and Initial Coordination Committee (Oct 2023 - Oct 2025)

This phase consists of building a governance foundation for a stakeholder led coordination committee to generate consensus around standard development activities. The activities continue to identify gaps in standards, generate system engineering collateral upon which to develop standards, as well as coordinate community-based specification development organizations (CBDO) and standard development organizations (SDO) to collaborate and build “standard stacks” that are interoperable.

The following documents are available from this project

MAT Use Case Papers

MAT Task 3.2 Use Case Final_508ready

Priority Gap Area White Papers

Multimodal and Accessible White Paper_PROW_FINAL-2025-04-28

Multimodal for All Travelers RSD White Paper_2025-05-05

Multimodal for All Travelers White Papers: Safety_2025-04-29

MAT Operational Readiness

Multimodal for All Travelers Task 5 Operational Readiness_ 2025-05-05

Standard Coordinating Committee (SCC) Action Plan

ITE MAT Task 2.1 Action Plan-Final_20240205

SCC Charter DRAFT 2024-05-081