49 U.S.C. § 6311 — Research and development grants

The Secretary^* may give grants to, or make cooperative agreements or contracts with, public entities and nonprofit private entities, including State transportation departments, metropolitan planning organizations, and higher-education institutions, for: (1) investigating the subjects listed in section 6302(b)(3)(B)(vi); (2) researching and developing new ways to collect, standardize, manage, integrate, share, interpret, and analyze data; (3) State, local-government, and metropolitan-planning-organization demonstration programs that coordinate data collection, reporting, management, storage, and archiving to make comparisons across jurisdictions easier; (4) electronic transportation-data and related-information clearinghouses as part of the Library^*; and (5) developing and improving ways to share geographic data in support of the database under section 6310 and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure created under Executive Order 12906 or a successor order.