This specification details the purpose, use cases, and schema for Jurisdictions. Jurisdictions are an optional service that are served by a coordinated group of agencies. Jurisdictions can be 'optionally authenticated', making the endpoints unauthenticated and public. In the future this will shift to 'optionally private', where Jursidictions will be public by default. Note that it serves a different purpose from the Geography API, though it does reference areas within Geography by ID.
City and transportation agencies need to regulate mobility within their own jurisdictions. Within a collection of agencies under a single MDS software deployment, those agencies need to coordinate and share relevant data between one another when their jurisdictions overlap.
The jurisdictions API helps to solve the following problems when implementing MDS in a multi-jurisdictional environment:
- Giving agencies a mechanism to communicate boundaries between one another and to mobility providers.
- Some agencies manage multiple overlapping jurisdictions and need a mechanism to administer scope and permissions to data.
A jurisdiction is:
- A representation of an agency’s authority to the outside world
- Human-readable name
- Uniquely identified
- Purview to make rules over physical boundaries and modal boundaries (e.g. a jurisdiction could be for taxis only)
- A way of tracking revisions in an agency's authority
The Jurisdictions API and all of its endpoints are marked as a beta feature starting in the 1.1.0 release. It has not been tested in real world scenarios, and may be adjusted in future releases.
Beta feature: Yes (as of 1.1.0). Leave feedback
For a single jurisdiction MDS deployment, a city designates a jurisdiction that providers can reference and know in what area to send events. When a trip leaves the LADOT jurisdiction, providers need to send an event with the vehicle state set to elsewhere.
Cities and agencies contained within the MPO would internally be able filter for their own jurisdictional data. This would allow mobility providers to not need to send MDS data to multiple MDS instances.
In addition, Agency authority have an explicit revision mechanism through a canonical API.
Agencies and mobility providers would be able to understand agency authority in a geographical area and in what mobility mode through a list of jurisdictions..
Example: LADOT has jurisdictional authority over the city of Los Angeles for micromobility permitting, and jurisdictional authority over the county of Los Angeles for taxi permitting.
Example: A SaaS company contracts with Miami-Dade County to provide MDS. There are 34 cities within the county. Miami-Dade County needs to assign permissions to each city to control who writes policy, based on jurisdictions. A Jurisdictions object with a stable identifier can be used for access control.
Example: The City of Miami has different data visualization tools from the city of Coral Gables Those tools can be granted data access from the SaaS tool based on the jurisdiction's stable identifier.
Jurisdictions can be served by agencies through the following REST API, or via flat-files. Agencies may choose to make the endpoints public and non-authenticated.
All response fields must use lower_case_with_underscores.
Responses must set the Content-Type header, as specified in the Provider versioning section. They must also specify the current API version being served in the JSON-formatted response body, under the version key.
Response bodies must be a UTF-8 encoded JSON object.
The response to a client request must include a valid HTTP status code defined in the IANA HTTP Status Code Registry
A Jurisdiction optionally contains a reference to a Geography object. This reference may change over time, e.g. if two
When a Jurisdiction is updated, the old version should remain in the back-end for archival purposes.
An individual Jurisdiction object is defined by the following fields:
| Name | Type | Required / Optional | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
jurisdiction_id |
UUID | Required | Unique ID of Jurisdiction. This field is immutable. |
agency_key |
String | Required | A unique string key for the Jurisdiction. This field must also be immutable. Allows for easier management of Jurisdiction-based access control in JWTs. |
agency_name |
String | Optional | Human-readable agency name for display purposes. |
description |
String | Required | Description of Jurisdiction. |
geography_id |
UUID | Optional | The unique ID of the geography covered by this Jurisdiction. |
mobility_modes |
String[] | Optional | Set this field to specify what mobility modes a jurisdiction applies to. Valid values are left up to the agency to determine, but a couple examples that we think might be useful are 'taxi' and 'micromobility'. An empty array or undefined field indicates all mobility modes are covered under this jurisdiction. |
timestamp |
timestamp | Required | Creation or update time of a Jurisdiction. |
Formatted in JSON, a Jurisdiction object should look like this:
{
jurisdiction_id: UUID
agency_key: string
agency_name: string
geography_id: UUID
timestamp: Timestamp
}
Gets all of an agency's Jurisdictions. Served by agencies.
Parameters:
| Name | Type | R/O | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
effective |
Timestamp | O | See the state of all the Jurisdictions (i.e. which ones are effective) at that point in time. If not supplied, the default is to show only Jurisdictions that are currently in effect. |
Response codes:
- 200 - success
- 403 - unauthorized
- 500 - server error
Gets a single Jurisdictions. Served by agencies
Parameters:
| Name | Type | R/O | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
effective |
Timestamp | O | See the version of the Jurisdiction that was in effect at that point in time. |
Response codes:
- 200 - Success
- 403 - Unauthorized
- 404 - not found
- 500 - Server error
To use flat files, Jurisdictions shall be represented in the following files:
jurisdictions.jsongeographies.json
The format and content of jurisdictions.json should resemble the responses from GET /jurisdictions.
The publishing Agency should establish and communicate to interested parties how frequently these files should be polled.
The updated field in the payload wrapper should be set to the time of publishing a revision, so that it is simple to identify a changed file.
See the Jurisdiction Examples for a sample jurisdictions.json file.
See the Geography Examples for an example geographies.json.