A Public-Private Partnership for City Streets
Shared Streets is a digital platform that aims to create a level playing field for street-related data and was launched in late February. A joint effort of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and the nonprofit group Open Transport Partnership, SharedStreets is a digital civic commons for all aspects of public and private street information.
SharedStreets processes, visualizes, and analyzes both open and private street-linked data, which can then be used by public and private-sector stakeholders to collaborate on street management and urban mobility. For now, its pilot applications focus on three buckets: traffic and safety, curbside management, and transit and shared mobility. These buckets include information on everything from curb lengths and intersection locations, to street closure notifications and trip information from private companies like Uber and Lyft. This information can then be used to designate bus lanes, manage congestion, or set parking prices, among other potential actions.
SharedStreets moves the conversation beyond just ‘open data.’ It has set itself up as a neutral repository of well-protected, well-displayed, aggregated, and anonymized information on anything street-related, and it challenges public and private stakeholders to come together onto the same base map and do more with their data sets. Whether public and private entities will readily use the system to share their data and contribute to larger policy solutions, and how well the system will secure the private data it does host, are both open questions. But, as many transportation officials and advocates note, a comprehensive street-based portal is something that is sorely needed, and it has the potential to encourage smarter, more efficient urban street management.
