MDS Use Cases

OMF's MDS (Mobility Data Specification) reduces the amount of city staff that are needed to create policy, enforce rules, manage hundreds of devices, audit data, and ensure the safe operations of vehicles in the public right of way. It saves time for providers by aligning their data services to a single standard across jurisdictions.

Collected here is a database of city use cases for MDS. These were gathered initially from OMF member cities and providers, and we welcome your feedback.

Use Case Database

A list of use cases is useful to show what's possible with MDS, to list what other cities are accomplishing with the data, to allow us to create deep links to filtered views, to see many use cases up front for privacy considerations, and to use for policy discussions and policy language.

We are using Airtable to collect, publish, and filter these use cases.

Here are two views of the MDS use cases for cities.

Gallery

• Gallery View

Grid

• Grid/Spreadsheet View

If you have suggestions, additions, or comments, please send them to use using this form.

Example Filters

Here are some more examples of uses cases with specific filter combinations:

• Louisville's Use Cases
• Use case with an image
• Use cases that may need trip line data

Cities Tagged

Cities that have tagged their use cases are:

1. Santa Monica
2. Washington DC
3. Louisville
4. Portland
5. Miami
6. San Francisco
7. Seattle
8. Los Angeles
9. Miami-Dade County
10. Austin
11. Kansas City MO

If you would like to tag your city, please use this form.

Extracted List

Here are city MDS uses cases, created by extracting the name and description from the database. A curated list is also on the MDS main page.

1. Vehicle Caps - Determine total number of devices per operator in the right of way.
2. Distribution Requirements - Ensure devices are distributed according to equity requirements.
3. Daily Permit Fees - Calculate fees per scooter deployed/ridden per day.
4. Restricted Area Rides - Find locations where devices are operating or passing through restricted areas.
5. Top Speed Calculations - Determine the average speed of a trip and ensure it meets requirements of top speed and slow area requirements.
6. Resident Complaints - Investigate and validate complaints from residents about operations, parking, riding, speed, etc, usually reported through 311.
7. Injury Investigation - Investigate injuries and collisions with other objects and cars to determine roadway accident causes.
8. Infrastructure Planning - Determine where to place new bike/scooter lanes and drop zones based on usage and demand, start and end points, and trips taken.
9. City Council Reports - Use data to communicate the value, successes, and issues of a mobility policy and allow guidance on safe operations and approval.
10. Curb Management - Compare to other curb users and change policy to make better use and remove conflicts.
11. Sidewalk Management - Ensure devices are not ending or riding on sidewalks and use data to validate. Validate resident reports.
12. Right of Way Management - Alerts to remove devices from public right of way where known issues occur, or create plans to fix these issues.
13. Route Usage/Demand - Determine which routes are the most popular for riders and tell area business, improve physical space, add parking, etc.
14. Origin/Destination Demand - A key tool for transportation planners, learn areas where people are riding to and from (campus, entertainment district, business core, etc), and how they get there, and change policy to match.
15. Road Diet Effects - Determine road usage by riders before and after implementing road diets.
16. Road Improvement Effects - Determine road usage by riders before and after implementing road changes, improvements, signal retimings, etc.
17. Car Reduction Analysis - Determine if multi modal changes to roads lead to increased ridership and combine with other data to determine car traffic reductions.
18. Road Area Impact - Showing which trips across a city touched certain roads for how work, closures, or improvements may impact this.
19. Pollution Mitigation - Using trips along a corridor in conjunction with other vehicle data (eg, Waze) to reduce emissions over time.
20. Public Transparency - Communicate to the public what data is collected by companies and what subset of information is shared with cities. Show where devices are going to and from and when they are operating.
21. Academic Research - Allow university researchers to use the data for analysis, prediction, and modeling to adjust policy to meet goals. With data sharing agreement.
22. Public Civic Tech Projects - Encourage local volunteers to use the data for visualization, analysis, feedback, and recommendations to the city.
23. Trips per Vehicle - Count trips taken per vehicle per day, for fleet increase/reduction.
24. Parking Area Performance - Location and performance of all designated parking areas.
25. Crash Reports - Investigate crashes reported by riders, public, or operators.
26. Vandalism Incidents - Investigate vandalism reported to the city by public or operator.
27. Trip Duration - Stats on trip durations
28. Trip Distance - Stats on trip distance travelled, provided in data and validated with trip lines.
29. Hourly Utilization - Hourly fleet utilization with origin/destination locations
30. Vehicles of Specified Status - The number of vehicles of a specified status that are within a specified geography at a specific moment in time.
31. Publish No-Ride Zones - Digitally publish no ride areas for providers to use.
32. Restrict Hours of Operation - Ensure operating hours are being followed, like no riding late at night for safety in some cities.
33. Service Area Operations - Find devices being ridden or parked outside of service area, but still within jurisdiction.
34. Publish No-Parking Zones - Digitally publish no parking areas for providers to prohibit parking.
35. Publish Slow Speed Zones - Digitally publish slower speed areas for providers to use, reducing speeds to 5mph, 10mph, etc below the vehicle max speeds.
36. Publish Preferred Parking Zones - Digitally publish preferred parking locations areas for providers to encourage riders to use.
37. Publish Emergency Guidance - Digitally publish unplanned events beforehand or in realtime rules for providers to implement, such as emergency road closures, water main breaks, etc. to help them keep their users and contractors informed and safe.
38. Impact on Transit - Provide visibility into the relationship between micromobility and other modes, such as public transit.
39. Publish Event Areas - Digitally publish beforehand or in realtime rules for providers to implement temporary planned events, such as concerts, slow streets, festivals, etc. to help them keep their users and contractors informed and for better route planning and re-balancing efforts.
40. Street Condition Improvement - Prioritize street paving by using Street Condition Index values and popular trips for safer rides.
41. Street Lighting Improvement - Prioritize street lighting upgrades (new lights, brighter more frequent lights) by looking at popular trips and rides past sunset for safety improvements.
42. Publish Fleet Caps - Digitally publish vehicle caps per provider to allow dynamic fleet size adjustment based on policy.
43. Validate Ground Truth - Use real-world rides or audit tools to discover data discrepancies and discuss with providers.
44. Open Data - Publish a subset of raw data to open data websites for analysis and accountability by anyone, and fulfill open records requests.