The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB)’s newest committee, the Mobility Analytics Subcommittee (MAS), held its first meeting on December 11, 2025. As a subcommittee of the TPB Technical Committee, the MAS was formed to examine and understand travel patterns in the region and provide support for TPB members and stakeholders around the topic of mobility data monitoring, collection, and analysis. Since 2005, travel monitoring activities have fallen within the oversight of the TPB’s Travel Forecasting Subcommittee (TFS); however, the formation of the MAS means that travel monitoring activity oversight has now shifted to the new subcommittee, freeing the TFS to focus on forecasting systems while the MAS can focus on mobility trends—trends that are influenced by housing, environmental considerations, economic development, and population trends.

The MAS will advise TPB staff on the development of the TPB’s enhanced travel monitoring program, the Mobility Analytics Program (MAP), and TPB’s improved Congestion Management Process (CMP) products. This will be achieved through activities, presentations, and events related to transportation systems and operations and vehicle probe data innovations occurring throughout the TPB region. Probe data is collected from vehicles, and smartphones inside vehicles, equipped with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to offer insights into traffic speeds, volumes, and conditions. Probe data collection is a consistent element of regional transportation agencies' transportation operations and system management.

MAS members represent state and local agencies and departments in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia focused on traffic engineering, planning, modeling, data analytics and visualization, and program management. TPB staff identified 70 data metrics within six categories that fall within the region’s scope for mobility analytics for the first round of the Mobility Analytics Program. So far, data has been collected on 40 of the 70 metrics, and the MAS will be provided with an update concerning the data visualizations and analytics of these metrics at their upcoming meeting in order to advise TPB staff on next steps. The categories and sub-categories for the 70 metrics include:

• Safety (Auto-related, Active Transportation, Truck-related)
• Asset Management (Infrastructure Condition)
• Congestion Management (Public Transportation, Congestion Management, Travel Behavior and Demand)
• Economic Development (Regional Airport Economic Impacts, Trucking and Freight Economic Impacts)
• Environmental Considerations (Emissions and Air Quality, Clean Transportation and Environmental Resilience)
• Cooperative Forecasting (Jobs and Destinations, Land Use and Socioeconomic)

The goal of the Mobility Analytics Program is to help tell the story of travel in the TPB region as a snapshot of what is driving the demand for travel. This includes what travel looks like across the different modes and what the positive and negative externalities of this travel are. The MAP will aggregate the data into one, easy-to-access, and easy-to-read portal to assist TPB's stakeholders in accessing transportation data, across the six categories, in one location.  

Next Meeting

The MAS next meets on March 26, 2026, at 1:30 P.M. A live stream will be available the day of the meeting.

Resources

For more information on the subcommittee’s Inaugural meeting, including the meeting recording, see the December 11 event page.

For questions, contact Ian Newman, TPB Program Manager for Travel Monitoring & Planning Assistance, inewman@mwcog.org.