New micromobility data platform launched to help cities and operators

In August 2020, the New Urban Mobility alliance (NUMO) launched a new platform, Micromobility & Your City: Leveraging Data to Achieve Policy Outcomes. This platform enables cities to evaluate different micromobility services against their policy goals in order that these can serve as best practices to promote safer, sustainable and equitable micromobility programmes.

The main goal of the platform is to enable cities and micromobility service operators to cooperate, not only in complying with existing regulations, but also to proactively address the mobility needs of cities and assess how micromobility solutions can contribute to their policy objectives.

The platform provides information on different micromobility-related goals, such as access, safety, infrastructure, environment, operations and education, amongst others. The platform includes evaluation metrics that will be useful for cities to enable them to assess their progress towards the achievement of their micromobility goals. Supporting information has been taken from different sources, including cities and operators.

NUMO brought together over 50 partners, ranging from city level governments to mobility service operators (i.e. Bird and Lyft), research entities and data aggregators (i.e. Populus) to gather input and reach consensus on how to use micromobility-related data to achieve the goals established by cities. In addition to the discussion process, a survey covering local regulations governing micromobility services was undertaken. This survey also focused on the evaluation of 7 pilot programmes that have been developed in the USA, Canada and Mexico. The results of these two strands were brought together to provide the data and use cases that have been included in the 'Micromobility & Your City' platform.

Harriet Tregoning, the Director of NUMO stated that “There is clearly an interaction between cities — their urban form and street networks, the quality and reach of transit, the mix of uses in neighbourhoods — and the utility of micromobility offerings in those cities.” She goes further by stressing the added value of the platform since it “ (…) can help cities, transit agencies and micromobility operators work together more effectively to meet their mutual goals of increasing affordable, safe, reliable, convenient access while lowering carbon and pollution”.

NUMO has already begun working on a series of updates to the platform to ensure that it remains a valuable and widely available tool that can be used by the different micromobility stakeholders. Sebastian Castellanos, research lead at NUMO, has already expressed their willingness to receive further suggestions from cities, operators and other related organisations on how to improve the platform.  

Photo Credit: View Apart/ Shutterstock.com – no permission to re-use image(s) without separate licence from Shutterstock.

Article first published first at SmartCities Dive on 10 August 2020