In spring 2018, Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, issued a grave warning about the new generation of urban transportation companies such as Uber. “A lot of these private actors and companies are not mobility companies,” Reynolds told an audience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “They are data companies. And they are building new empires on top of a platform that we are absolutely not ready for.” The power dynamics must shift, she continued. “We have to bust our ways of thinking inside government in particular.”
Later that fall, Los Angeles launched an open-source data standard and software system designed to hold sway over these new operators. Known as the “mobility data specification,” or MDS, the platform collects information from discrete vehicle trips in near real time, and lets the city communicate back to operators.
Right now, it’s only being used by “micromobility” companies: In order to keep its sidewalks clear of stray dockless scooters and bikes, LA requires operators to send start and stop locations of individual vehicle trips back to City Hall, within five seconds, in addition to the routes they traveled within 24 hours. Eventually, all kinds of current and future transportation forms—from ride-hailing and car-sharing to delivery drones and autonomous vehicles—could fall under the omniscient gaze of the MDS platform. By gathering these data points, as well as trip times and whether vehicles are on or off, Reynolds says she can manage the size and dispersal of licensed private fleets, and eventually where they travel, take off, and land.
LA’s model has been hailed as key to the future of urban mobility. In the face of disruptive technologies clogging streets and edging into the skies, at least 70 U.S. municipalities and several global cities have adopted parts of MDS since LA formally launched its scooter rules in late 2018. The New York Times recently featured Reynolds as a problem-solving “eyewitness to monumental shifts in transportation.”