Updates to the Mobility Data Specification & Why They Matter
Image provided by the Open Mobility Foundation
First introduced in September 2018, the goal of the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) is “to provide a standardized way for municipalities or other regulatory agencies to ingest, compare and analyze data from mobility service providers, and to give municipalities the ability to express regulation in machine-readable formats.” The Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), which manages MDS, released an update (Version 0.4.1) and a new version (Version 1.0.0) in March and September 2020. Together, these releases have big implications for the future of micromobility. Below, we briefly summarize the releases and explain why the changes they made matter to cities and operators.
Version 0.4.1
Vehicles Endpoint (released 5/15/20)
Before
MDS originally launched with the idea that a vehicle would log each time it changed status, meaning that when a vehicle first became available for rent or when it parked, it would be logged. So, initially cities were only notified of changes to a vehicle. If a vehicle did not change—for example, it stayed parked for hours—we would not hear from it via MDS APIs.
After
With v0.4.1, MDS launched a live update beta feature from each vehicle, meaning that every vehicle would now log their current status on a minute-by-minute basis whether it was the same or different from the minute before.
The impact
Live information on every vehicle (beta)
More accurate vehicle counts
Version 1.0.0
New Statuses (released 9/16/20)
Before
MDS originally launched with the following vehicle status options: available, reserved, unavailable, removed, elsewhere.
After
With v1.0.0, the old statuses were scrapped and new ones introduced: available, trip (previously a part of the “reserved” status), reserved, non-operational (previously “unavailable”), removed, elsewhere, and unknown. The new statuses better align with on-the-ground operations and with the industry-standard Mobility Data Collaborative's Data Sharing Glossary and Metrics for Shared Micromobility issued by SAE ITC.
The impact
Better alignment with operator workflow
Better understanding of vehicle status meanings
Okay, so what?
Cities are excited about the combination of changes in these two releases—using the Vehicles Endpoint with 'live' data together with the new statuses. Cities can now see exactly where each vehicle is every minute for every status, viewing in real-time which vehicles are on a trip and where they started, and how many vehicles in a fleet are out on the streets but are non-operational. Not only can cities see exactly what's going on, they also have all the vehicle details (ID and latitude/longitude coordinates). In a nutshell, these new versions of MDS give cities a greater ability to monitor operations, enforce policies, and reward desired behavior.
For operators, the releases better align with their internal workflows, allowing them to produce better data for cities. At the same time, such a large change requires quite a bit of work from operator engineers to transition their APIs to new version requirements. Because the workload is quite heavy, it will take time for all operators to update their APIs to comply with the latest version of MDS.
Where's Populus in all of this?
Of course, successful implementation of updates to MDS (and other data specifications) also rely on the ability of third-party data management solutions to quickly adjust to be able to ingest and display data via updated operator APIs. Recognizing that there will be a transition period, we have updated our platform to take in live data whether operators are using v0.4.1 or v1.0.0 vehicle statuses. We are also updating our counts (e.g., vehicle and parking counts) to be able to work with vehicle statuses from either version, ensuring a seamless transition for operators as they update their APIs.
The future
The latest versions of MDS open new doors. Internally, we are thinking carefully about what else could be done as a result of changes to MDS, particularly in terms of automated communication between cities and operators. With better data and communication, cities and operators—and, most importantly, end users—stand to benefit from operational improvements. Stay tuned for more exciting updates to come!