How to Best Integrate Urban Data and City APIs
Last summer, my good friend Alisyn Malek and I were both speaking at the Center for Automotive Research’s Management Briefing Seminar in Traverse City, MI. There we got to meet with Jennifer Byrne from Quesnay, who was also speaking at the conference. We were really excited to hear about how Quesnay was hosting “Female Founders in Mobility 2020”, an innovation competition specific to mobility, and catered towards female founders. When we offered our help to the founders, one of the major questions was around integrating with urban data and city APIs; how to prioritize it, access it, and integrate with it. Since we’ve both had experience tackling this challenge, Alisyn and I sat down to provide some tips for the founders.
If you’re a startup founder or an enterprise product owner, and your service offering relies on, or would benefit from integrating with city data, you know that it can be daunting, time-consuming, and frustrating.
Answering the following questions will provide food for thought on doing more with less, unlocking the potential of the resources you already have, and ignoring distractions.
Are you targeting the right audience and taking the Smallest Viable Market approach?
Different cities and citizens have different mindsets, and this combination can heavily impact who will find the most value from your offering.
1. Are you biased towards your own city, or have you identified the best market where your offering will gain traction?
We know it’s probably most convenient to focus on your home city, but it’s worthwhile asking if you’re catering to a problem that your citizens are already trying to solve, and that your solution is differentiated within the region.
2. Does your target city have stated goals toward solving problems in mobility, or specifically the problem-space you’re playing in?
To borrow an age-old sales analogy, you’d rather be selling Bibles than religion. You are likely to get more support and have better infrastructure for innovation and testing in cities where the need for solutions like yours has already been identified and stated publicly.
For example, Detroit and Arlington have stated goals on their city websites, and are more likely to partner with you than cities where the problem hasn’t yet been acknowledged.
3. Are you solving problems specific to the type of region that you’re catering to?
Growing cities tend to worry more about congestion, parking, throughput, passenger safety, and pedestrian and cyclist safety. Rural areas tend to worry more about serving transportation in a dispersed demand environment.
For example, CanGo is a great example of focusing on the need for security and safety in mobility in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
How willing are you to partner up and play nice?
In the micro-mobility world, we’ve seen both approaches. While some scooter companies have “shown up and thrown up” scooters in your city, companies like Spin take a partnership-first approach, and collaborate with municipalities before launching.
4. What’s in it for the city?
Promote the benefits to the city and its citizens. Make sure that this is front-and-center when working with city officials, so they can view your solution through the lens of the people they serve.
5. Are you protecting the citizens and their data?
It’s important to city officials that innovation doesn’t come at the cost of security or privacy. Make sure you’re prioritizing the adherence to PII in randomizing and anonymizing data, and communicate the steps you’re taking to ensure safety and reliability.
6. What are you willing to share?
City officials often have to make major decisions around infrastructure, and the data you create can influence those decisions. It’s good to form an opinion on your willingness to share data, information, or insights, and the associated costs.
For example, companies like roundtrip.ai focus on solving the challenges with sharing data back to cities.
7. Are there other companies you can partner with?
While “old mobility” solutions like buses and streetcars usually have one service provider per city, ”new mobility” solutions — like ride-sharing and scooters — tend to have two or three providers in a city.
Rather than competing over data, it may make sense to take an open-source mindset to further the experience you provide for your customers. We know that cleansing, hosting, and integrating data can cost time, effort, and focus, so think about who you might partner with.
Are you leading with customer experience in mind, or is the access to data leading your experience?
If you find yourself limiting how delightful your experience could be based on the availability of city data APIs, there may be ways you could make progress now and worry about scalability later.
8. Are you sure you need real-time data that’s extremely precise?
Depending on your offering, you may be able to use historical trends or batched data to offer value.
For example, the ParkNav app tells you where you are likely to find street parking based on historical trends. While this doesn’t guarantee a spot is available, it’s valuable nevertheless to point drivers closer to streets where parking has historically been available for that time of day/week/month.
9. Could you run operations with some manual processes today, with the intent of automating them as you learn more?
While it’s natural to want to automate everything, there may be steps in your process where it’s more efficient (to operate and to learn) by having people run manual processes on the back-end.
For example, Amazon famously had humans helping with the speech recognition and artificial intelligence of Alexa in the early days.
10. Are you keeping up to date with emerging standards around data formats?
Data formats like MDS are gaining a lot of traction, and it’s important for you to keep up to date. Model your data structures and architectures to be compatible. Since we can’t predict the future, a best-practice is to follow software design principles to make decisions, and move forward now while minimizing the cost of changes in the future.
If you’ve had any similar experiences, we would love to hear how you’ve overcome challenges around urban data, city data APIs, or lack thereof. If you would like help with architecting your data models, identifying your smallest viable market, or identifying lean approaches to making progress with limited resources, sign up here for a complimentary office hour, and our consultants would love to nerd out with you.
The future of transportation and mobility is going to transform even more rapidly with the global pandemic and we’re optimistic about the future.
Alisyn Malek is the Founder and CEO of Middle Third, a boutique consultancy focused on mobility strategy. Alisyn has extensive industry experience, from EV product development and corporate venture and strategy at GM to early-stage startups as the co-founder and COO of May Mobility, all of which inform her work.
Ashok Sivanand is the CEO of Integral., a Detroit-based software consulting firm that focuses on building great teams that build great products. Ashok is a student of lean product management, human-centered design, agile software engineering, theory of constraints, organizational behavior, and cooking with a smoker.
