A planner asked me whether their agency was "competitive" for an FHWA ATTAIN grant. Fair question. It is also the second question.
The first one is smaller and more useful: for each selection criterion, can you produce a number, before and after?
That is what these applications turn on. Not the vision paragraph. The evidence.
The program, briefly
ATTAIN is the Advanced Transportation Technologies and Innovation program, authorized under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and administered by FHWA. It funds deployment of advanced transportation technology: planning and management systems, traveler information, performance data collection, mobility on demand.
It is competitive. Awards are capped per recipient per fiscal year, and there is a local match requirement. Eligible applicants include transit agencies, local governments, MPOs, and multi-jurisdictional groups.
Program parameters move between rounds. Confirm the dollar amounts, deadlines and criteria weighting against the current Notice of Funding Opportunity before you plan around anything you read here, including this post.
The mechanism: every criterion wants a measurement
Read the statutory selection criteria closely and a pattern shows up. Almost every one is asking you to quantify a change, not describe an intention.
That reframes the work. Instead of asking "are we competitive," ask "which of these five numbers can we already produce, and which would we be guessing at?"
| The criterion asks about | What it actually wants | The number to have ready | |---|---|---| | Cost reduction and return on investment | Evidence you can evaluate a change before spending on it | Annual operating cost of the current network, and of the proposed one, on the same cost basis | | Operational performance | Evidence you measure service, not just run it | Revenue hours, vehicles required, span and frequency, before and after | | Advanced mobility and shared use | Evidence you can size a service zone rather than draw one by feel | Population, jobs and demographics inside a candidate zone | | Human services for underserved communities | Evidence equity is an output of your process, not a memo at the end | Share of minority, low-income, senior, youth, disability, zero-vehicle and limited-English population served, before and after | | Data collection and use | Evidence the analysis runs on your live data, not a sample | The source and vintage of every input, and whether you can re-run it next quarter |
Say your agency is considering consolidating two low-ridership routes into one. The vision paragraph writes itself. The scoring does not. What moves the score is being able to say: this removes 3,100 annual revenue hours and one peak vehicle, it changes the low-income population within a quarter mile by this much, and here is the same analysis re-run after the change to prove it.
Two of those numbers come from your GTFS. One comes from Census ACS data joined to your network. None of them require a grant to produce. That is the point.
Where agencies actually get stuck
Not on the technology. On the arithmetic, twice over.
The first time is before the application, producing a credible baseline. The second time is after the award, when the grant requires you to report whether the deployment did what you said it would. An agency that cannot produce the before number cannot produce the after number either, and the reporting obligation runs for the life of the project.
An agency that can already run a before-and-after on its own network is in a materially different position from one that plans to build that capability with the grant. The first is demonstrating a track record. The second is asking to be trusted.
What software does not do
Worth saying plainly, because grant-adjacent marketing tends not to.
Alignment is not an award. Selection is competitive and weighted to that year's criteria, and a strong analytical foundation does not overcome a weak project concept.
A planning platform does not write your application. It does not supply your local match. It does not certify your Title VI compliance, and no tool can. It produces the measurements your application has to rest on, and it produces them again afterward when the reporting comes due.
Some capabilities named in ATTAIN criteria sit outside what a planning tool covers at all. Real-time vehicle data, fare payment integration, and dispatch are operations systems, not planning systems. If your project concept centers on those, scope them to the vendors who build them.
The principle
You do not need a grant to start measuring. You need measurements to win one.
If your agency is weighing an ATTAIN application, run the before-and-after on one real service change you are already considering. Whatever you learn about your own data in that exercise, you would rather learn it now than in month three of a funded project.
What is the change you would model first?
LMAi Labs builds Transit Planner, a planning workspace that runs cost, Title VI equity and transit-access analysis on an agency's own GTFS and Census data. We are the technology and methodology partner. We do not write grant applications or provide match funding. The underlying equity method is documented at planning.lmailabs.ai/methodology.
