Hey there,
At FabMob, we wrote some extensive documentation on some of the topics you face, especially with relation to standards. Most of them are in French, but we’ve translated one report that you might be interested in.
Overall, this is a complex subject, and really depends on the use cases you want to tackle. Most people tend to use specific tooling for each part of a job (route planning and fleet management are very different problems), and it’s quite rare to have analysis spanning across multiple regions.
Here are my two cents on your questions.
What frameworks or platforms have you used to integrate open data with mobility services?
- Data sources: OpenStreetMap, transport.data.gouv.fr (the French National Access Point for all transport data), https://avatar.cerema.fr/ (gathers traffic counting data in France)
- Tooling:
- general analysis: python and its libraries (geopandas, osmx)
- handling GTFS: Mobility Data has a few tools MobilityData IO · GitHub
- handling NeTEx: Entur has a few tools Entur AS · GitHub
- Route planning: OpenTripPlanner, MOTIS, Open Route Service (Cool API, worth a look), Graphhopper, Valhalla, OSRMn or even pgRouting.
- You can also check this wiki page that I’m currently writing, referencing open source tools to study mobility Centre de documentation : Outils ouverts pour l'étude des mobilités — Communauté de la Fabrique des Mobilités (There is a dedicated part on transport modeling, which is its own can of beans, but very useful to drive mobility decisions)
- Then you have all the proprietary/paid APIs, such as Google Maps API, Here, Navitia. But it did not seem you were looking to simply buy a solution (consulting firms do exists, if you want to go that way)
Are there any recommended standards (e.g., GTFS, NeTEx, MDS) that you found particularly useful or limiting?
- In a few words:
- GTFS: most used world wide, quite simple, you should start with this one.
- GTFS-RT & GBFS: Real time and vehicle sharing, meant for journey planning a real time discovery of availability. Shouldn’t really be used to analyze usage. Data freshness varies, depends on the provider.
- NeTEx: Quite complex, but contains info you won’t find anywhere else. Intermodality is well-supported, accessibility also. Since it’s the mandatory standard in EU, usage is growing, starting from Nordic countries, but we’re not there yet.
- MDS: This one was meant to help with tracking usage, but it’s not used by most.
How do you handle the balance between open innovation and data privacy/regulatory concerns?
With its MMTIS directive, EU actually uses regulation to push for open data, thus open innovation. But it stops at describing what transports are available and how to book them. It does not cover how people are using these transports.
Usually this information is gathered during large scale studies, in France we have a standardized way called EMC² (Enquêtes mobilité certifiées Cerema). A few territories have publicly shared the anonymized replies, but you typically have to work directly with the local authority to get the raw data. These are the bread and butter on how and why people move the way they do.
We also see emerging new sources of information with GPS based data, also called Floating Car Data or Floating Cellular Data (FCD). Most providers do not really care about privacy, or were smart enough to write general terms of use that users accept blindly, allowing them to do whatever with info gathered from apps. At FabMob we believed there was another way, with explicit consent by users, ready to share their travelling to improve their city infrastructures (Tracemob project). In practice, it’s very hard to convince people when you’re that transparent.
Any tools or libraries you’d suggest for visualizing mobility trends using this data?
See first question. But we’re big fans of the visualizations made by https://diagnostic-mobilite.fr/.
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Anyway, if any of this raises more questions, I hope the community can shine in their own answers.
We could also plan for a deeper dive on your specific use cases with the FabMob permanent team (which I am part of), or work together to start a small working group to share this kind knowledge. (Note that this would require finding a bit of funding to do a proper job).
Contacting the permanent team : contact@fabmob.io
