A Guidebook for Mobility Innovation
Principles to Plan, Design, & Implement Innovative Mobility Projects
Published April 2023, revised June 2025
About this Guidebook
The Shared-Use Mobility Center (SUMC) conducted industry-wide research on mobility innovation to understand what excites, challenges, and stumps people in the world of mobility innovation. To do this, SUMC turned to leaders in the mobility industry to understand their needs and gathered qualitative data from innovators in the field through expert interviews, surveys, and workshops. Through these efforts, SUMC found that innovators in the mobility industry need a resource that guides processes, tools, and best practices to effectively conduct needs assessments, capture the right datasets and quality of data, develop strong and lasting partnerships, and have access to mobility precedence for reference to accelerate innovation at their organizations to be better suited to implement innovative mobility projects.
The Shared-Use Mobility Center (SUMC) is grateful to the Federal Transit Administration, who made this work possible through cooperative agreements with SUMC in support of their mobility innovation initiatives. Content and conclusions of this report are solely those of SUMC.
Why Use this Guidebook
This guidebook is intended for anyone in the transportation sector who knows that their community’s transportation systems can do better and are ready to pilot new ideas. It is designed to help mobility innovators before and during a pilot project.
The goal of this guidebook is to provide a series of principles to better plan, design, and implement innovative mobility pilot projects. These principles have supporting information about strategies to execute this principle, examples of this principle in action, resources about this principle, and questions to prompt team discussions.
The principles have been developed from SUMC’s research to provide strategies, resources, discussions, and examples to catapult action and to bring the principles to life. The principles included in this guidebook summarize a wide range of experiences from stakeholders working in different types of innovative mobility projects. As a result, this guidebook intends to serve a variety of mobility pilot projects and organizational change processes, as well as to support as many mobility professionals working in different contexts as possible. SUMC’s hope is that this guidebook will help teams plan, design, and implement innovative mobility pilot projects better.
Principles to Plan, Design, and Implement Innovative Mobility Pilot Projects. Published in April 2023.
Principles to Plan, Design, & Implement Innovative Mobility Projects was supported by:
