MDS Vehicles
The real-time MDS Provider Vehicles status endpoint can be used to help cities manage fleets of devices anywhere in and out of the public right of way. For cities that have been using GBFS to track vehicles for reporting and compliance purposes, Vehicles offers an easy-to-use alternative that delivers several crucial benefits over GBFS when used in the governmental context. MDS is not intended as an alternative to GBFS in end-user facing applications. Read our OMF blog post entitled A Kit of Parts: How to Use MDS Vehicles for an additional sharable summary.
This document applies to MDS 1.x versions.
MDS is a modular 'kit of parts' standard and cities can choose to use the only parts they need. A city that is only interested in getting current status of deployed vehicles can choose to use just Vehicles without using the other components of MDS. A city does not need to collect trip data or event data if they do not need this information.
Vehicles is authenticated and secure between the mobility service provider and the city agency, so it contains some more information than GBFS. It uses static vehicle IDs, which allows an individual vehicle's deployment to be observed over time. It also provides additional data not present in GBFS.
Both MDS Provider Vehicles and GBFS free bike status offer real-time information about vehicles deployed on public streets. The chart below shows key differences between the MDS Vehicles endpoint and GBFS free bike status.
| MDS - Provider vehicles (v1.0.0) | GBFS - free_bike_status (v2.1rc) | |
|---|---|---|
| Identifier | Unchanging vehicle ID | Randomized vehicle IDs |
| Vehicle State | 5 states including removed, on trip, outside jurisdiction, or unknown. | 4 combinations via available and disabled states |
| Vehicle Event | 26 events including rebalancing, maintenance, off hours, reserved, cancelled trips, comms lost, and low or charged battery | Not applicable |
| Visibility | Private: for internal city management and policy enforcement | Public: visible to all |
For a full chart of all fields with more details, and a link to presentation slides, see this supporting MDS / GBFS Real-time Status Comparison Document.
There is some information is included with MDS Vehicles that is not available in GBFS Free Bike Status:
- Static vehicle ID
- Important to track how devices are used around a city and how companies are managing them.
- More vehicle information around non-public operations (company drop off, maintenance, rebalancing, missing, removed)
- This is important to know about vehicles that are in the public right of way (streets, sidewalks, parks, etc) or outside of it (left jurisdiction, removed from service) and what the provider knows about them. These vehicles are not available to be ridden and hence not visible in a public data feed.
- Battery percent (instead of estimated range)
- Current percent of battery level on the device.
For general differences between MDS and GBFS, see our detailed guide.
