And as virtually any transit official will acknowledge, these features are supported by technology and powered by data — which is made more serviceable when it’s easily shared.
“Open source standards are the future of transportation,” said Jana Lynott, co-author of a research report by the Shared-Use Mobility Center with AARP that examines the use cases for data sharing and how this enables more effective, interoperative transit systems.
The report, Connecting Community Transportation: Lessons Learned from Transactional Data Specification Demonstration Projects, calls attention to an emerging form of data specification known as Transactional Data Specification (TDS), which establishes a common language allowing transportation providers to share data related to customers, their destinations or scheduling. TDS becomes especially applicable in the operation of demand-response transit agencies, which offer a more door-to-door service style than traditional transit. TDS also enables communication among transit operators and their various service management platforms, moving one step closer toward the concept of transportation systems working as a coordinated unit, rather than as atomized individual operators.
“We need to look beyond building roads and rail lines to how we integrate that infrastructure and all of the services that are out there,” Lynott, longtime former senior policy adviser to the AARP Public Policy Institute, said via email. “The TDS is just one subset of open source code for the transportation sector.”
Data specifications are not new. The General Transit Feed Specification enables the sharing of data from standard fixed-route transit systems with consumer-facing platforms, like the Transit app or Google Maps. Mobility Data Specifications allows for the standardized flow of data from mobility operators to the city. It’s the common language of transportation operators, such as taxis, transportation network companies, free-floating car-share operations and even sidewalk delivery bots. Curb Data Specification helps to standardize the practice of digital curb management, making it easier for cities to turn to technology providers to help make curbs more dynamically used.
A pilot project led by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is working to develop trip-planning operations among three small transit operators serving dial-a-ride and paratransit customers in a small rural area. The pilot launched in November 2023 and allows riders to plan trips using the Transit app. The TDS communicates a trip request with scheduling software used by the different agencies, and puts that request in the service queue.
Technology advances like these are not solely for the purpose of making life easier for transit operators — which almost always happens — but are really for transit users, and making the systems work better for them.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that in the first nine months, ridership among the three transit agencies increased 4.2 percent, Joseph Palmersheim, public affairs program administrator for MnDOT, said.
“This data-sharing technology allows platforms like Google and Apple Maps to display transit routes and timetables for trip planning, but flexible services like dial-a-ride had previously been left out,” Palmersheim said via email. “Due to this oversight, there are thousands of rural transit routes in the U.S. that don’t currently show up on these trip planners.”
TDS is also being used by the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization in Colorado, by RideNoCo, which facilitates mobility management. RideNoCo works with several demand-response transit providers in the area to coordinate their operations.
In rural Lake County, Ore., TDS is being used as a framework for communication between two transportation providers.
“The TDS makes rural and human services transportation more convenient for the customer by fostering a regional network of providers,” Lynott explained. “Small providers have limited staff and technology budgets. The TDS allows demand-response transit providers to share trip and need-to-know customer data with one another in a way that is easy and convenient, without the need to pick up the phone or send an email. It is an essential tool to help them break down their agency silos.”
