A Practical Guide to Mobility Data Sharing and Cities is a 20-page guide identifies several use cases and the data needed for these use cases, current methods for data sharing and analysis, and data privacy challenges. The paper provides a good high-level introduction and overview of all the major topics related to the use of shared mobility data.

The paper 1 discusses the following use cases:

  • Operations
    • Utilization rates
  • Planning and Analysis
    • Equity analysis, such as allocations to low income neighborhoods, usage in such areas, and the impacts of subsidizing the cost of rides 
    • Parking needs for shared mobility services, e.g., heat maps of vehicle parking events can identify where micromobility “corrals” are needed
    • Trip path data can identify where bike lanes or “slow street” policies are most needed
    • Input to curb management policies and regulations for specific areas of the curb
  • Enforcement
    • Monitoring that each operator’s fleet size stays within the cap for that fleet
    • Adherence to geographic service restrictions
    • Addressing complaints about inappropriately parked or broken vehicles. 

The data sharing and analysis section describes the GBFS and MDS standards and discusses the impact of the change made to GBFS to rotate or remove vehicle IDs, improving customer privacy but reducing the ability of the feeds to meet certain analytic use cases. 

The discussion of MDS includes some of the real-world issues that were identified in using MDS data to meet certain use cases and the changes that were recently made to MDS to address these issues.

The report ends with a brief discussion of some of the privacy regulations that may impact programs, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the California Electronic Communication Privacy Act (CalECPA).