Fiscal Note
The funding for the proposed contract is included in the Planning Division’s MPO operating budget and includes both carryover 2019 ($99,000 total) and 2020 ($26,000 total) grant funding. The federal and state grant funding that MATPB receives covers 85% of the cost with the remaining 15% matching amount mostly covered by the City. No additional City appropriation is required.
Title
Authorizing, on behalf of the Madison Area Transportation Planning Board - An MPO, a noncompetitive sole source contract for a one-year subscription renewal to an online transportation data analytics software platform from Streetlight Data, Inc. to support MPO and City of Madison planning activities
Body
WHEREAS, the City of Madison is responsible for providing professional staff services to the Madison Area Transportation Planning Board (“MATPB”), the designated metropolitan planning organization (“MPO”) for the Madison area, as provided for in the 2007 MPO designation agreement; and
WHEREAS, the City of Madison is the administrative and fiscal agent for the MATPB and is a legally constituted entity under the laws of the State of Wisconsin and able to receive the federal and state grant funding, which covers 85% of the MATPB budget; and
WHEREAS, as the designated MPO for the Madison area MATPB has responsibilities to perform metropolitan transportation planning and programming activities, including development of a long-range multi-modal regional transportation plan and transportation improvement program; and
WHEREAS, due to limitations in scale, cost, and time, traditional travel data collection methods alone are not sufficient to support effective transportation planning and project design given the changing transportation landscape as evidenced by the impact of COVID-19 on travel, and transportation professionals are therefore turning to Big Data resources and software to support planning for the future; and
WHEREAS, MATPB hired a consulting team led by Cambridge Systematics in 2019 to develop a new, improved regional travel forecast model to support MATPB transportation plans, studies and project level forecasts provided for state and local projects; and
WHEREAS, MATPB built into the travel model project budget funding for Big Data to support the calibration and validation of the model, including origin/destination data, estimated daily travel volumes on roadways, and travel speed data; and
WHEREAS, after conducting extensive research with the travel model project consultant team on Big Data vendors MATPB decided to have the consultant purchase an annual subscription on behalf of MATPB to Streetlight InSight, Streetlight Data’s on-demand transportation analytics software platform to support the project and other MPO planning activities; and
WHEREAS, Streetlight Data’s StreetLight InSight® transportation analysis tool offers many unique capabilities that differentiate it from competing Big Data vendors, including:
• Ability to run and interactively visualize unique customized projects in a cloud-based web platform to understand travel patterns, traffic behavior, and demographic information about the composite group of travelers being analyzed;
• Use of data derived from both location-based services and navigation-GPS data sources;
• Use of an analytic data processing engine that algorithmically integrates spatial data points from multiple types of devices into trips and activities, and also contextualizes the Big Data with conventional data, including Census data and traffic counters;
• Availability of data on multiple modes of travel in the platform, including motor vehicle, medium and heavy duty trucks, bicycles, and pedestrians with plans to add public transit later this year;
• Availability of estimated average annual travel volume (AADT) counts for almost all roadways in the U.S. by algorithmically combining five data sources;
• Ability to estimate vehicle miles of travel (VMT) for different areas or roadway networks;
• Provision of additional, regular enhancements to the platform at no additional cost to the subscriber; and
WHEREAS, MPO staff has or is using the StreetLight platform to support numerous other planning work besides the travel model project through which it was initially acquired, including its transit development plan, congestion management process, equity analysis for its Title VI plan, and to support city of Madison initiatives, including Vision Zero and the Metro route restructure study; and
WHEREAS, MPO staff has found StreetLight Data metrics to be highly accurate, the platform easy to use, and the customer service excellent, and the experience gained with the platform will result in efficiencies from continued use rather than switching to another platform, which wouldn’t offer all of the capabilities of Streetlight InSight anyway; and
WHEREAS, the cost of the annual subscription is $125,000 (after a $33,000 discount) with 85% of that or $106,250 covered by federal/state grant funds, $84,150 of which will be paid for with 2019 carryover grant funding and will be lost if the funds are not spent by June 30, 2020; and
WHEREAS, under MGO 4.26(4)(b) annual software contracts of more than $50,000 per year that are not competitively selected must be approved by the Common Council and must meet one of the exceptions to competitive bidding in MGO 4.26(4)(a); and
WHEREAS, for the reasons above and also spelled out in the attached noncompetitive selection request form, the Streetlight InSight® transportation analytics platform provides unique capabilities not offered by other vendors, thus meeting the exception of 4.26(4)(a)2., and continuing the subscription with the existing vendor is more economical on the basis of time and money, meeting the exception of 4.26(4)(a)7.
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Common Council authorizes the Mayor and City Clerk to sign a one-year renewal contract on behalf of the MATPB for $125,000 with StreetLight Data, Inc. for the purposes described above to support the MPO and City of Madison’s planning activities, including development of the MPO’s long-range transportation plan, transit development plan, and congestion management process and supporting the City of Madison’s Metro Route Restructure Study and Vision Zero Initiative.