MDS Working Group

• Every other Thursday at 9am PT, 12pm ET, 5/6pm CET

Zoom Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAscOmhpjIuHNakPx6CNbACpjUjw1Gsucr4

One tap mobile: +19294362866,,84170989462#,,,,*612987# US (New York) - though we encourage Zoom

Bring your mobility and right-of-way problems to the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) Curb Working Group for an interactive problem-solving session. OMF will offer a collaborative environment for municipalities, companies, technical, privacy, and policy professionals to work together to help public agencies accomplish their mobility policy goals. Together, attendees will identify solutions to problem statements brought by participants, including discussing relevant stakeholders, and how to leverage data and digital tools. Goals include:

• Come up with fresh solutions for stubborn issues in mobility management
• Educate attendees about the role of data standards and digital toolsets (specifically MDS) in meeting policy goals
• Use current digital tools to solve problems and identify gaps to share with the OMF to shape future work

Designed for policy professionals and technical teams interested in collaborative problem-solving around mobility management. Participants from both public and private sectors are encouraged to attend and should come prepared with problem statements and ready to collaborate around transportation and public use issues. Examples of potential problem statements include:

• How can I ensure micromobility in my city is equitable?
• I want to manage the right of way flexibly and in real time
• How can we make sure our delivery programs are equitable?
• Can we communicate road closure and truck routes to navigation apps?
• We’d love to track paratransit so that we know what’s available/effective
• I need to reduce congestion and safety concerns caused by passenger services

• Agenda and Overview - Angela
• Your Mobility Question - Angela
  • Free form Google Forms survey
• General Overview of MDS - Michael
  • Plus intro to Steering Committee
• Steering Committee panel of experts reviews your questions, picks 3 (15 min each) - WGSC, Michael, Angela
  • How is it possible to solve for your question?
  • What data elements are involved?
  • How does MDS fit in as part of the solution?

WGSC Meeting Organizers

• Host: Craig Dittmann, San Jose DOT
• Facilitator: Michael Schnuerle, OMF
• Outreach: Michael Schnuerle, OMF
• Note taker: TBD

1. Agency to use MDS passenger services mode for paratransit and bring back learnings to WG
2. Talk to your ESRI rep about including more MDS data publishing and ingestion tools.
3. WG member create an issue to discuss adding incidents, crashes, unplanned stops, damage, etc as a new field in Trips. Now possible with tech for micro and other modes like AVs, robots.

• 22 Attendees
• OMF Slides

Intent of Solutions Clinic is to use Working Group as a collaborative space to develop solutions to mobility problems. Could be broad or specific. Want to give examples and ideas for how MDS 2.0 can be used alongside other data and tools.

Discussion around these questions:

How can I ensure micromobility in my city is equitable?

• Hard to track progress when you have a new metric you never had before
• MDS can express policies digitally
• There are many equity-related dials that MDS can support, e.g., reduced fees (Policy API & Trip endpoint), trips and unique users of low-income plans (Reports endpoint), set distribution requirements (Policy API)
• How can we expand upon existing metrics and track effectiveness and outcomes? May need some additional research in this space

The MDS 2.0 permit requirement needs to go beyond the permit language to be more specific in terms of capability/performance; cities also need to actively enforce the MDS 2.0 requirements in the permit once deployed. If not, operators that spend $$ for a working solution that could still result in penalties.

• How can municipalities leverage MDS 2.0 to compel operators and providers to better communicate on status and performance of shared mobility fleets? Requiring data is one thing, but performance is another.
• Model permit language contains language for permit requirements.
• Policies and goals vary by jurisdiction
• Policy Requirements file clearly elucidates required versions, endpoints, and required/disallowed fields. Easy to change later and keep up to date.
• OMF available to educate cities and agencies on MDS and benefits
• Contact the OMF if you are an agency or working with one so we can help.

I want to manage the right of way flexibly and in real time

• MDS Policy can do this for most modes and programs

We’d love to track paratransit so that we know what’s available/effective

• MDS Passenger Services can do this for the most part not, though not explicit.
• Was discussed during development
• Like all new MDS features, welcome an agency to try it out and bring back learnings.

How can we make CDS and MDS play as nicely as possible with ESRI-based applications already used by the City, specifically how can CDS and MDS be ingested by non-JSON systems and how can data from those systems be ported back into CDS and/or MDS?

• ESRI recently released tools to get cities most of the way to CDS. See 4/18/23 CDS WG meeting notes.
• Talk to your ESRI rep about including more MDS data publishing and ingestion tools.

How can MDS capture location, duration, and reason for AV pax services unplanned stops (e.g., AV stops on rail tracks) and planned stops (e.g., pick-up/drop-off events)

• Could be captured as events, which would allow for capturing durations.
• Capturing reasons currently not captured but it's possible. Depends on what information is available to operator.
• May need to consider latency of data - more information might be available later.
• Modifications to MDS can be made, tested, and proposed for inclusion in the formal spec via GitHub.
• Could also associate with Telemetry data, e.g., data from companies like Drover can indicate if micromobility device is on sidewalk.