In the spirit of transparency and collaboration, Austin Transportation has published open data and reporting tools that lay out citywide usage of dockless mobility, including bicycles and scooters. This data is anonymous and streamlined using data standards shared by leading American cities.
 
These tools make it possible for transportation designers and planners, community advocates, policymakers and counterpart government agencies to analyze dockless mobility usage patterns and continue to work toward safe and equitable shared mobility goals.
 
“With the mobility landscape in cities changing at the speed of tech, we strive to share data on new mobility options with the public as seamlessly as possible,” said Jason JonMichael, Assistant Director for Smart Mobility at Austin Transportation. “Anyone can use this data to gain insight into how these options are being used, how they can be improved, and how those lessons can benefit cities everywhere.”
 
These open data and reporting tools include the Dockless Vehicle Trips dataset, Dockless Data Explorer and Dockless Reporting Dashboard. Information for these tools has been anonymized to protect user privacy.

• The Dockless Vehicle Trips dataset records trips taken in the city - at over two million, and counting - and is updated daily.
• The Dockless Data Explorer is an interactive tool that visually displays clusters where trips start and end.
• The Dockless Reporting Dashboard provides monthly summaries for statistics, such as trip numbers, miles traveled, average distance traveled, average trip duration, and number of devices.

In developing these tools, Austin Transportation created the Austin Dockless Application Programming Interface (API), a tool based on cutting-edge cloud technology that gives others fast and powerful access to dockless mobility data. The API acts as a geospatial interface to the Dockless Vehicle Trips dataset and powers the Dockless Data Explorer. Austin Transportation hopes that other transportation agencies can reuse this code to create their own interactive visualizations.

These tools support innovation among mobility service providers while measuring the effects of these new services on the transportation network as a whole. Licensed dockless mobility operators are required to provide the City with real-time trip reporting feeds. These feeds are informed by the Mobility Data Specification, an emerging data standard for dockless trip reporting. The standard, which can be adopted in whole or in part, was initiated by the City of Los Angeles with contributions from the cities of Santa Monica, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and others.
 
The public can submit feedback on these data reporting tools to transportation-data@austintexas.gov. Information about Austin's Dockless Mobility Program is available at AustinTexas.gov/DocklessMobility.