Laura Bliss managed to make an entertaining article about an emerging set of data standards. She had me at Mobility Data Specification (MDS). Others might be more interested in the bureaucrat battling Uber, the hint of corruption, or the grandiose visions of the future of traffic.
I’m excited about MDS. Of course I am; I am a transportation data scientist. I am also concerned, about privacy, about expectations, and a bit about people’s motives. In the spirit of my last post, I’ll try to make an interesting connection, this time to smartphone location data.
A Primer on MDS
MDS is three APIs that enable communication between mobility providers and government agencies. The companies report details about vehicles they manage, including the routes taken on individual trips, to the agencies. A growing number of cities require shared bicycle and scooter fleet operators to provide data via MDS.
MDS and the effort to mandate its use are championed by Seleta Reynolds at the City of Los Angeles. Backers say MDS will improve transportation network modeling and public planning. Right now there is precious little data available on micromobility. Startups like Streetlight Data and Replica could definitely use MDS data in interesting ways. Remix has a blog post about why cities should require MDS. The other main benefit involves oversight and regulation enforcement. To be honest, that seems to be the more impactful feature. It would be nice to know and be able to penalize Bird when their scooters pile up and block the sidewalk.
Uber has tried to block the scooter requirements. Of course they would try to block technology that powers oversight and enforcement. But Uber is citing privacy concerns that have garnered support from the ACLU and EFF, among others. It would be relatively easy to track individual people’s movements using trip-level data from an on-demand mobility service.
Ground Traffic Control
Both sides in the MDS debate are keenly aware that Reynolds would like to force Uber and others to provide data about car and other trips as well, in real-time. Scooters are just the beginning.Thus the expansive name. Reynolds and some of the firms invested in MDS have grandiose visions; Bliss’s article has a section on “air traffic control, for the streets.”
There is a difference between system optimal and user equilibrium in transportation. Many of us have been trying to bridge the gap by adjusting driver incentives locally, optimizing traffic signal timing, giving transit signal priority, etc. I don’t know what having real-time data on all vehicle movements stored in one place gets you. It is exciting to think about. And a privacy nightmare. Mainly though, I think the visions of the future being peddled are completely at odds with what I’ve seen on the ground at local government.
Bliss’s piece is interesting because it points out the crazy here, and the somewhat shady ties between Reynolds and a particular small firm or two heavily invested in MDS. The relevant piece in the New York Times is more fawning and less interesting.
GTFS? GTFO
In 2011, I produced my own fawning and uninteresting article on a similar topic. Google (with some help from Portland’s Tri-Met) had developed the General (nee Google) Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). Agencies around the world were translating their transit schedules into the format. The immediate goal was to enable the public to plan trips on Google maps, but GTFS was also making transit network analysis and planning easier. GTFS has been called “one of the biggest success stories in mobility data” and it certainly felt like it in 2011.
In my article, I tried to point out how much more could be done with real-time transit vehicle location data posted in a common format on the internet. I made some silly plots based on data that probably wasn’t supposed to be publicly available. If I’m being honest, I was partly motivated by a desire to increase the odds of escaping personally and socially profitless academic work. I wanted to catch the eye of someone at Google or to generate the spark that would lead to founding a startup.
In the years that followed, some friends complained about GTFS. The preeminent technology firm in Silicon Valley was requiring their small town’s under-resourced, technologically-challenged Department of Transportation to code up their own data to match the tech firm’s specifications.
LADOT has been quite clear that MDS was “inspired by the GTFS.”They hope that MDS becomes a globally accepted standard and that services that utilize MDS data to empower bureaucrats are developed. Certain supporters probably also like the idea of the public sector developing the standard and tech companies being forced to code up their own data to follow the standard. Hopefully none are angling for a job at a tech company.
Knowing that some agencies struggled to put their static transit schedules in GTFS format, I do wonder what would happen if these same agencies had to develop services to receive real-time MDS data. What would they do with the data if they did have it? Would they be able to mitigate concerns around privacy? Even the relatively sophisticated agencies leading the charge on MDS seem naive when it comes to privacy. On their MDS FAQ page, LADOT commits to using “plain language” and to “appropriately address GDPR.” Which, well, isn’t the point. I wonder who will step in to help agencies manage the data. Who will make money off MDS?
Cellphone Location Tracking
A New York Times opinion piece from December drew a lot of attention to privacy concerns. It named and shamed 20 companies selling data tracking the locations of individual cellphones. People were outraged. I was wondering how many hot new transportation startups were using this data. It would certainly help transportation network modeling. The last paragraph is haunting.
“We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.”
Part of me is convinced MDS represents technology companies persuading local government to surveil their citizens’ travel to a greater degree than was imaginable a few years ago. Part of me is excited about the opportunities MDS offers. Part of me worries I just scuttled my chances to work for the tech companies that will one day run Ground Traffic Control and the transit agencies most likely to need a data scientist.
Disclaimer: I worked at Uber for a year, although not on anything remotely related to MDS. I have met with most of the people and firms mentioned in this story once or twice, usually while looking for a job or grant money. I don’t think that there is any connection between those meetings and this article. Transportation tech is a small world.
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