Over the past decade, the emergence of new mobility services - such as Uber, Lyft, and now electric scooters - have rapidly begun to reshape how people make transportation choices. Many regard ridehailing services in particular as the closest analogy that we have to autonomous vehicles, so understanding their impacts on cities is critical to planning for the future of mobility.
Some say that services like Uber and Lyft are helping people give up their cars and increase their use of more sustainable options, such as public transit. Others have found that ridehailing services contribute to congestion in major cities and reduce transit ridership. So which is it? The answer is most likely both, and it depends on the city in question, the state of public transit, the pain/ costs of driving, and many other factors that shape people’s transportation choices.
What policymakers ultimately need is access to better data about new mobility solutions that are emerging in cities - including electric scooters - to develop more informed policies and plans that can help us maximize the benefits of these services, while reducing the potential downsides. With data, cities can measure progress towards public goals such as reducing congestion, expanding equitable access to transportation, and improving safety. Without data, it is unclear which direction we are headed.
New policies and regulations have begun to facilitate more data sharing from private mobility services, opening the door to many opportunities as well as new unforeseen challenges faced by cities.
Opportunities for Cities to Use Mobility Data for Policy and Planning
Access to new data from shared mobility services, including Uber, Lyft, and electric scooters can help accelerate progress towards improving the efficiency of our streets and the overall sustainability of transportation in cities. In most cases, the sharing of data is likely to facilitate the growth of shared services themselves - in short, this is a win-win for the public sector and private operators. Here are just a few examples of how better data from private mobility providers can work for everyone:
Reclaiming public and private spaces currently dedicated to parked cars. The vast majority of cities in the United States have allocated far too much public and private space to parking. As shared mobility services continue to grow, and personal driving continues to decrease over time, it seems obvious that most cities should reclaim this space for shared vehicles - including bikes, scooters, shared cars, and most importantly, public transit. However, cities will need to arm themselves with better data to justify these politically difficult reallocations of public space.
Designing safe and more efficient pick-up and drop-off zones for Uber/Lyft, and delivery vehicles. With better data, cities can help ensure that when shared and delivery vehicles pull over they are less likely to disrupt the flow of traffic, block bus lanes, or present a danger to cyclists (and scooterists). It is mind-boggling that in 2018, we have only seen a few pilots in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and a handful of other places to make it easier for transportation services that are moving large numbers of people in cities to do so more safely and more efficiently.
Identifying opportunities to expand bike (and scooter) lanes. One of the key benefits of electric scooters is that they are getting more people into bike lanes, which can facilitate safety in numbers. With access to data, cities can better identify where to expand micromobility infrastructure - lanes and parking - to bring about much needed change in how we allocate our streets, prioritizing the movement of people, not cars.
Expanding equitable access to transportation. There is early evidence that dockless bike and scooter services can expand access to transportation services in ways that traditionally procured systems have sometimes struggled to do. With information about where vehicles are placed, and where trips take place, cities can assess and incentivize expanding access to mobility in low-income and historically underserved areas.
A Few Key Challenges of Mobility Data Sharing
Limited technical resources in the public sector. The public sector has incredibly smart people solving very difficult problems. However, a fundamental reality is that on the technical side, for every one engineer or data scientist working for a city there are 10 to 50+ in the private sector. An effective strategy for cities is to partner with private third-party data platforms that can enable them to easily and cost-effectively make use of big data for policy and planning.
Protecting personally identifiable information. Unlike public transit trip data, Uber/Lyft trips and dockless bike/scooter trips are often made door-to-door. It is much easier to re-identify an individual person with data from shared mobility services. Research by MIT has shown that with only four location points and times from a mobile phone are enough to identify an individual, and in 2015, a reporter at Gawker used publicly available data from the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission to re-identify celebrities. Cities will need to develop strategies to effectively safeguard data that contains personally sensitive information - on their own, or with trusted third-party platforms.
Developing standards in a fast-moving transportation environment. As dockless electric scooters arrived across the United States this year, many permits were put in place by cities requiring the sharing of data - often with different requirements for what and how data should be shared. Without widely adopted data standards, both cities and private mobility operators will struggle to facilitate the efficient use of better data for transportation policy and planning.
As shared mobility services continue to grow at a rapidly accelerating pace, cities have a newfound opportunity to harness data from shared fleets of vehicles (bikes, scooters, and cars) to craft data-driven policies and investments for a better transportation future. We are at an important juncture for public and private transportation players to find new ways of partnering to accelerate progress towards common goals. Although there are a few key hurdles to overcome, if cities and private mobility operators can find a path forward, we can grasp this critical moment to reshape the future of urban mobility.
Regina Clewlow is the CEO of Populus, a platform empowering cities to manage the future of mobility. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or my website.
