Better understanding of the impacts of new mobility services (NMS) is needed to inform evidence-based policy, but cities and researchers are hindered by a lack of access to detailed system data. Application programming interface (API) services can be a medium for real-time data sharing and access, and have been used for data collection in the past, but the literature lacks a systematic examination of the potential value of publicly available API data for extracting policy-relevant information, specifically supply and demand, on NMS. The objectives of this study are: 1) to catalogue all the publicly available API data streams for NMS in three major cities known as the Cascadia Corridor (Vancouver, British Columbia; Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon); 2) to create, apply, and share web data extraction tools (Python scripts) for each API; and 3) to assess the usefulness of the extracted data in quantifying supply and demand for each service. Results reveal some measures of supply and demand that can be extracted from API data and be useful in future analysis (mostly for bikeshare and carshare services, not ridesourcing). However, important information on supply and demand of most of the NMS in these cities cannot be obtained through API data extraction. Stronger open data policies for mobility services are therefore needed if policymakers want to obtain useful and independent insights on the usage of these services.
Street Computing: Towards an Integrated Open Data Application Programming Interface (API) for Cities
