TransitScreen and MobilityData team up on open data initiative

D.C.–based TransitScreen, a software company providing a real-time mobility information platform, has launched a new open data initiative with MobilityData, a nonprofit currently incubated by the Rocky Mountain Institute. The organizations formed OpenMobilityData to accelerate the creation and sharing of global public transit, urban transportation and shared mobility data, a press release states.

“Complete and high-quality data is the foundation upon which the mobility industry is being built,” Leo Frachet, technical co-director at MobilityData said in a statement. “OpenMobilityData provides a neutral home for the whole industry to publish, visualize, and explore this data.”

MobilityData works to drive adoption of standardized mobility formats, increase the completeness of data formats and improve the accuracy and quality of data. With a focus on increasing the amount of mobility apps with higher quality of transit data, the company has specific goals through July 2019 to improve the general transit feed specification (GTFS).

“The mobility industry badly needs an open data commons with integrated tools for creating and editing mobility information, just like you can edit Wikipedia,” Matt Caywood, CEO of TransitScreen said in a statement. “Data creators want to contribute their time and effort to open platforms. OpenMobilityData will do for mobility data what OpenStreetMap did for geographic data.”

OpenMobilityData will be the first data commons to fully integrate with transit data editors to update data automatically and will launch with a list of partners including TransLoc Architect, GTFS manager from Trillium Solutions, and a GTFS editor from Conveyal. The companies reported that OpenMobilityData has already acquired TransitFeeds, a popular mobility data commons, since it serves 6 million data requests annually from nearly 1, 000 transit data feeds from 39 countries.

OpenMobilityData’s new site is TransitFeeds’ old one.