Quito: Community-sourcing data for Mobility at the gates of the New Urban Agenda
Cities are the challenge, but also within cities there are the solutions. And in this era of Smart Cities, we have learned that Data, properly analysed, and worked, can be the magic tool with which the bleak future we are facing can change.
At Door2Door Data lies at the core of our business and system. We have developed an ecosystem of products that not only provide short term solutions to the big challenges of Mobility and Public Transport in the cities with long-lasting positive effects, but that also become ways to redefine commute, and the first step is TrackYourCity.
Quito Metropolitan District, like many other big cities from the global south is facing several challenges through its development resulting from the urban sprawl and the lack of proactive planning. According to the Mobility assessment for the Territorial Development Plan, Quito Metropolitan District, with a population of 2,239,191 inhabitants generates an estimated total of 4,600,000 trips distributed between motorised and non-motorised means of transport. Out of these, 61.5% are served by public transportation, and while this figure might sound positive and encouraging, reality has proven otherwise. Between the centralisation of trips to the Hyper-centre and the north, south, and east sprawl, the city faces a clear outpace of infrastructure impossible to overcome.
Unable to satisfy the growing demand, the city has pushed its inhabitants to acquire private transport which has doubled in the last 10 years prompting the vicious circle of road network growth vs. the time it takes to saturate it. In a city where public transport tries to cover most of the mobility demand making use of only 30% of the road network, while the private transport, which satisfies a meagre percentage making use of the other 70% of road network, the shifting of paradigms is urgent and crucial.
So… how do we start?
In cities where data is
- Not open
- Zealously guarded
- Non existent
- In useless non-digital formats
How can we develop solutions?
We create the Data.
Our goal is to build the digital public transport map of each data-less city. This is the first step towards making sense of the challenges and start taking data-driven decisions and develop solutions.
In the case of Quito, we did not start from scratch. The General Planning Secretariat, aware of the potential benefits from Data through the Information Management Direction ran a project to track and map the public transport in order to build a dataset in GTFS format to be given to the citizenry through an intermediary: Google.
As huge and commendable an effort and willingness to provide citizens with data in a usable and friendly platform, this is not quite the definition of Open Data when the citizens will not have the means to appropriate the data to modify routes or provide feedback on them; they won´t be able to express their concerns or build their own solutions which, is one of the greatest strengths of the Smart Cities panacea when innovation comes from the end users: the citizens who become actual participants on the creation of data and solutions. The use of an intermediary then, always comes with a price that constrains development.
So, how to overcome constraints?
WE WORK TOGETHER!
It all started with a strong will and vision of changing reality. Our Project Lead David Armando Rivera Moncada, graduated from the MSc. in Geo-information came to us to collaborate in open-sourcing the Public Transport data in his city Quito. From that point, he became our ambassador, the community capacity builder, the main point of contact and the best supporter!
Then we needed to get all the help we could gather to make this change come to life…
We approached first the General Planning Secretariat. Together with the specialist in urban planning and transport Andrés Jarrín Silva, Technical Coordinator, we understood Quito´s Public Transport through its administrative divisions and learned about their mapping progress. We proposed our help to finish the enterprise by tracking the inter-parish routes and share data to open-source it on OpenStreetMap.
THE NEXT STEP? WE FIND OUR COMMUNITY!
We approached the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, addressing its Human Science Faculty. We got a positive reply from MSc. Olga H. Mayorga J. and MSc. Norma Soledad Vázquez Cárdenas from the Geographic Sciences and Territorial Planning School and under their tutelage, the community took life thanks to the enthusiastic students.
Together, the big challenge that Quito posed, was tackled in three steps:
1. Create a list of Routes
How does it work? Thanks to the help from the General Planning Secretariat, we got a list of all the routes comprising the public transport system in the Metropolitan District of Quito. The main purpose of having this list, is to make sense of all the routes, their origin points, their destination points, the routes´names and providers. Once we have the list ready, is easier for our Project Lead to distribute routes to track and subsequently digitise.
2. Track the Routes
This is when the fun begins! Our incredible community is assigned a number of routes to track. What does that mean?
Equipped with a Smartphone, our volunteers receive a quick but thorough tutorial on the open-sourced tracking tool OsmAnd. The work is easy but laborious. Each team needs to get on the bus of the assigned route at the origin point or base. Once the bus starts running, they will start the app to record the trail. The must ride the bus all the way to the end of the route, the destination point or base. When they have reached this point, they stop recording and save the tracked route. Then they have to do the same process for the route back. If you want to know more on how to track routes using OsmAnd, you can visit TrackYourCity website and in section TechTalk you will find our tutorials.
On a good day, our volunteers are able to track 2 or 3 routes, but in general, given the high congestion conditions in the city, they could record with luck, only 2 routes per day back and forth. During tracking, there is no need for internet connection, but once the day is over, is time for all those recordings or GPX tracks to get uploaded into OpenStreetMap to be further edited.
Once the tracks have been uploaded, the platform will provide a tracking ID number, which we use to enhance our original Routes List:
3. Edit the Routes
Once all the tracks are uploaded in OpenStreetMap, is time to edit them, that means, to place the routes on the map making sure the line drawn fits with the street they should be riding on, and add the necessary data to identify the route perfectly. Such data include the origin and destination points, the relation to to other routes and sub-routes as well as details like service provider.
What tends to get difficult to grasp is the notion of relations, but is quite simple. Just think of it this way: you have a route that goes let´s say from the National University to the Airport; we know that this route also has a way back, that is from the Airport to the National University. Each of these 2 components is one sub-route. When we put them together, that is National University — Airport — National University, they become a complete Route. That complete route is called the Master Route and it has a name, yet this name can vary according to the system or the cities. For example, it can have a name like “C1” or it can be the composition of the 2 points but reduced “University — Airport.” It is important to know these details cause the more accurate we are, the best results we get. Each subroute has an ID number for edition different from the tracking number, and the Master route also gets an ID number, that way is easier to work each of them and make sure we add them properly. This how our final Route List with the Edit IDs looks like:
If you want to know more about how to edit routes in OSM, please visit TrackYourCity website and check our tutorials.
And now what?
Well, after all routes have been edited, is time to check that the job was properly done. This means that there are no gaps on the sub-routes, and that all information required is attached to them. For this, we run a quality report that our Project Lead revises and makes sure to correct all errors with the community.
How does a route with gaps looks like? Something like this:
This is not too complicated to solve. What our community does is check the gap and edit it by adding what is missing and drawing it on the map.
Once the issues are solved, the map looks like this:
The Future
From here, the sky´s the limit! Thanks to the open-source principle upon which OpenStreetMap is built, literally every citizen willing to learn and improve the data can do so. They just need to create an account, there is our tutorial but also many other tutorials online and different courses around the globe to acquire the skills and, whenever they see a route that is incorrect, or that is missing something, they can go ahead and change it.
This is the beauty and the greatest strength of the OpenStreetMap community, they can appropriate the data and work it constantly to keep it updated. And that is our purpose with TrackYourCity.
We aim to inspire enthusiasts to build the best digital public transport map of the city in order to have better access to all means of transport available and encourage them to appropriate the tools to enhance the data. This way, we empower the citizens to make use of open data fully and show them how they can become solution providers. We want them to exercise their right to knowledge, to green energy and to inter-modality. All these by the creation of a digital and open-sourced map as the result of the work of the community.
We did it in Quito!
Thank you Universidad Pontificia Católica del Ecuador
Mtra. Olga H. Mayorga J.
Mtra. Norma Soledad Vázquez Cárdenas.
Thank you Secretaría General de Planificación
Arq. Samia Peñaherrera
Andrés Jarrín Silva.
Thank you to all the amazing students:
Cinthya Rojas
Xavier Morocho
Veronica Mejia
Carlos Vinueza
David Gutierrez
Paola Gaspar
Melani Bustamante
Gabriel Cabrera
Daniel Pazmiño
Angelica Quiña
Diego Cevallos
Wendy Almeida
Mishell Correa
Wladimir Guaman
Mauricio Flores
Josselyn Davalos
Julio Palacios
Felipe Salcedo
Ana Aguilera
Martin Loza
Rodrigo Flores
And Thank you David Armando Rivera Moncada for your utter commitment to make this happen, your drive and your professional ethics.
