Mobility Case Study: Managing an E-Scooter Pilot with Multiple Operators
Cities around the world have experienced the rapid introduction and expansion of new shared mobility services — carsharing, bikesharing, and now scooter-sharing. The data generated by these new mobility solutions can help cities better monitor and manage new mobility pilots, but the volume of data can also be a challenge to analyze, particularly from a large number of operators.
Building on decades of experience developing software and analysis solutions for public agencies, Populus introduced Mobility Manager early last year to help cities securely and effectively manage mobility data from multiple operators and multiple modes, including shared scooters, bikes, and cars. Our secure platform ingests real-time and historical data from fleet operators to give transportation planners the information they need for policymaking and infrastructure decisions.
The City of Chicago launched their e-scooter pilot program in June 2019 with 10 different companies and 2,500 scooters in a pilot geographic area on the city’s west side. Chicago’s rules for scooter operators during the pilot included operating times (5am-10pm), geofenced operating areas, and GPS data sharing requirements. Through the Populus platform, the city has found a way to manage the program with more visibility, as well as to easily harness data for future transportation policy and planning.
Chicago’s ambitious approach to bringing in a large number of micromobility companies presented some interesting challenges, including the need to access complex data streams from multiple operators with different levels of data-sharing compliance. Populus worked closely with the city and each operator to ensure that all required data feeds were compliant, validated, and usable. City staff can now easily access data from all 10 operators in one dashboard, with views on available vehicles, deployments in prioritized equity zones, and trips taken in the pilot area.
“The Populus platform helps us access and analyze data from all 10 operators in our pilot program. Mobility data serves a number of important uses cases — from daily management of our scooter pilot, to helping us plan safer streets for the future.” — Sean Wiedel, Assistant Commissioner with the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT)
Real-Time Location Data
In Populus Mobility Manager’s Live Map, Chicago city staff can quickly see scooters inside or outside the pilot program area in real-time. Live location data helps field staff perform physical spot checks to find scooters outside the boundaries and notify operators who are out of compliance.
Advancing Transportation Equity
To ensure residents have equitable access to scooters across the pilot area, Chicago requires operators to deploy 50% of its total fleet in two priority areas. Using our Equity map, staff can view vehicle availability in the priority zones over time and by operator. Staff can also track operator adherence to the city’s overall vehicle cap (250 maximum per operator) in Vehicle and Trip Count dashboards. Historical data for the entire fleet is available, as well as data for each scooter operator.
Visualizing High-Volume Routes
Using Populus Routes, city staff can instantly visualize where the highest volume of trips are taking place. Given how challenging infrastructure decisions can often be to make, this data-driven approach can help cities determine where multimodal infrastructure can be prioritized with evidence for public engagement.
Populus Mobility Manager securely delivers data from shared scooters and bikes in over 40 cities, by ingesting data through open data standards that our team actively contributes to. In providing tools that help improve the coordination and communication between shared mobility operators and cities, we’re working to help deliver safe, equitable, and sustainable streets for the future of mobility.
About Populus
At Populus, we’re helping cities and private mobility providers deliver safe, efficient, and equitable streets through better data. Our core platform, Populus Mobility Manager, integrates real-time data from multiple operators (shared bikes, scooters, and cars) for cities from coast to coast. Founded by transportation PhDs from MIT and UC Berkeley, the Populus team combines over 30 years of experience building software for (and with) public agencies to plan for the future.
Are you a city or mobility operator looking for advanced data software solutions? Join us for an upcoming webinar on the opportunities to harness new mobility data for transportation policy and planning, or download our resources online.
