Under the pressure of increased population, greening initiatives and technological progress, mobility in cities is fast evolving. The Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) was founded to help shape this process between cities and mobility operators.
Developing mobility options such as scooters and electric bikes have become ubiquitous in our cities, whether being ridden on the sidewalks or waiting to be picked up, we all see them on the streets on a daily basis. The introduction of these was not without teething issues and remains controversial. Pedestrians regularly feel reduced in their sometimes already limited space and the speed means not everyone is able to control the device safely. Yet, it seems these devices are popular and here to stay and thus policy needs to react to their introduction.
In the United States, a range of cities, among them the City of Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, New York and San Francisco have created the Open Mobility Foundation, to find a “public right of way” for these new mobility options, as Executive Director Jascha Franklin-Hodge put it when speaking to the OSOR. The OMF should be “a tool to create a way for public sector organisations to work together with private sector mobility companies and manage the challenges that cities face”.
As cities move away from an automobile-focused layout, new “policies and digital tools for regulation, enforcement, and planning” need to be developed, according to Franklin-Hodge and the OMF was created to initiate a dialogue between the different sides, as “increasingly public spaces are used by companies operating commercial services, governed by sophisticated algorithms. and the tools to regulate them are insufficient.”
The OMF describes itself as “an open-source software foundation that creates a governance structure around open-source mobility tools”. Asked why open source plays such an important role, Franklin-Hodge elaborated that the “open source model was chosen because it enables collaboration between organisations that do not necessarily have the same interests”. With this, the OMF is hoping to enable a similar effect that has led the private sector to collaborate on the development of projects such as the Linux kernel.
Currently, the main output of the OMF is the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), which was first developed by the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation and released on GitHub in 2018. Even before the release, cities around the world began to adopt the standard to enable communication between cities and mobility providers and today, also cities in Europe, such as Brussels, Rome and Paris use MDS today.
With MDS, the OMF is also taking an interesting pioneering approach to the development of a specification, trusting in open source development methods. The development is hosted on GitHub and the foundation being hosted under the OASIS Open, an organisation that traditionally was a standards development organisation (SDO), yet with Open Projects has ventured into the convergence of open source and standardisation.
As of late, more cities in Europe have even become members of the OMF, with Dublin, Ulm and the publicly-owned project ODIN (Open Mobility Data in the Nordics) have become full members of the initiative, indicating increased interest and adoption in Europe.