Smartphone Applications To Influence Travel Choices: Practices and Policies

Chapter 6. Guiding Principles For Public Agencies

With the growing popularity of smartphone applications, it is helpful for public agencies to recognize several guiding principles when considering the role and implementation of smartphone apps on a transportation network. These principles reflect current understanding, which will undoubtedly continue to evolve. These guiding principles include the following.

Data Sharing and Interoperability

Data sharing and interoperability will form the foundation of transportation apps, in particular mobility apps. Public and private entities could play a critical role in facilitating and defining data sharing through public-private partnerships. For example, in June 2014, during the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, the government obtained driver navigation data from Google’s Waze app and combined it with information from pedestrians who use the public transportation app Moovit, providing local authorities with valuable real-time information about the transportation network. Previously, the local transportation department had been reliant solely on road cameras and roadway sensor data. Incorporating data from Waze and Moovit allowed local officials to use aggregated mobility data on 110,000 drivers (half a million over the course of the month) and to identify thousands of operational issues ranging from congestion to roadway hazards (Olson, 2014). In exchange for sharing user mobility data with government authorities, Waze asked for transportation network data (e.g., sensor data, construction information, etc.). This is a notable example of how the public and private sector can mutually benefit through data exchange partnerships.

Open Data

Providingopen data has allowed local governments and public agencies the ability to offer real-time transportation information to their communities, without the cost or responsibility of developing or maintaining mobile applications themselves. For example, in Chattanooga, a partnership was formed between the Code for America⁴ team and the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority allowing digital public transit schedules to be available to third-party developers on GitHub. Public agencies need to develop acceptable use policies to provide terms and conditions for private sector use of public sector data. In another example, the North American Bikeshare Association recently adopted an open data standard, pledging to make real-time data feeds available in a standardized format so these data can be readily incorporated into smartphone applications. Efforts such as this will improve transparency and public access to bikesharing data and support the development of integrated software and end user applications. Some guiding principles for open data include:

1. Data Accessibility

Ensure that data made available are in an open format that can be downloaded, indexed, searchable, and machine-readable to allow automated processing.

2. Open License

Data are available to the public for use.

3. Data Quality and Timeliness

• Data are high quality scrubbed for plug-and-play end use by developers without requiring extensive effort to make datasets usable.

• Data are made available as quickly as possible and frequently enough to remain current and usable.

Once local governments have established open data standards and data become available, the next step is to establish data exchanges to share this information.

Data Exchanges

Public agencies could establish data exchanges to serve as a repository for public and private sector data sets. Public agencies can establish data exchanges by:

1. Data Accessibility

Ensure that data made available are in an open format that can be downloaded, indexed, searchable, and machine-readable to allow automated processing.

1. Data Accessibility

Ensure that data made available are in an open format that can be downloaded, indexed, searchable, and machine-readable to allow automated processing.

2. Open License

Data are available to the public for use.

3. Data Quality and Timeliness

• Data are high quality scrubbed for plug-and-play end use by developers without requiring extensive effort to make datasets usable.

• Data are made available as quickly as possible and frequently enough to remain current and usable.

Encouraging Multi-Modality

Leveraging smartphone applications to encourage multi-modal travel represents a key opportunity for public agencies. Enhancing multi-modal payment interfaces and enabling commuter benefit payment via smartphone apps are two ways public agencies can encourage multi-modal trips.

Enhancing Multi-Modal Payment Mechanisms

With a growing array of private sector trip planning (e.g., ticketing and fare payment apps and integrated solutions), fare payment is becoming increasingly complex for the end user. An end user may be able to plan an entire public transit trip on a single app, but generally these multi-modal connections will require multiple fare payments. Smartphone apps offer an opportunity to integrate fare payment mechanisms into a unified, single process where a user not only uses a single app to plan and execute an entire journey but also a single point-of-sale for the entire trip. Developing a common fare payment platform for a single point-of-sale to cover an entire journey (multiple modes) can make smartphone apps more convenient to use and support multi-modal trip planning, ticketing, and payment.

Expanding Commuter Benefits

Expanding commuter benefits to incentivize multi-modal trips could encourage the use of a broader variety of modes and services. This could be enabled by allowing smartphone apps access to pre-tax commuter accounts (e.g., journeys could be paid for by using pre-tax payroll deductions); employer-provided usage (e.g., mechanisms that allow employers to pay for commute expenses directly to an app service provider); and providing app-based commuter incentives linked to a user’s modal choice (e.g., incentives for carpooling or riding public transit, calculated and awarded based on a person's app account).

Protecting Consumer Privacy

Generally, smartphone apps collect a lot of private information from their users. In the transportation context, this can include particularly sensitive information, such as addresses, current location, location history, and financial information (for fare payment). More broadly, transportation apps can trace mobility habits and share a user’s location (via third-party APIs). Some users may or may not pay attention to the information usage permissions they grant (via user agreements and app installation processes). Sometimes the data shared and how the data will be used is opaque and confusing for the user. The private sector can aid mobility consumers in making informed decisions about the data they share by ensuring that user agreements are drafted in plain language, comprehensible, and easy to read on mobile devices so that users clearly understand how their personal data may be shared and used.

Developers can help protect consumer privacy by designing apps that do not require full-scale access to user data. This can help mitigate over sharing of consumer data. As a practical matter, developers should generally scrub their data and remove PII from data sets when sharing information with third parties, unless the information included serves a specific mobility function (e.g., sharing data as part of an API for a third-party app). De-linking user information (e.g., names and user identifications) from financial and location data can also help protect from unintentional data sharing and data breaches where de-linking is technically feasible to achieve the app’s purpose.

The public and private sector should continually develop (and enhance, as needed) policies that protect user data privacy. In January 2013, a report, "Privacy on The Go: Recommendations for the Mobile Ecosystem" provided high-level recommendations for app developers, app platform providers, mobile ad networks, operating system developers, and mobile carriers (Harris, 2013). The report identified many privacy problems; however, it concluded that more research is needed by governmental agencies on data privacy and data sharing issues.