Tapping Into Big Data

Bogotá, Colombia

The Action

Bogotá’s transportation secretariat and the taxi hailing app Tappsi partnered to provide valuable insight into Bogotá’s traffic patterns. Together, they reached a pioneering data sharing agreement to provide accessible, anonymized traffic data held by Tappsi on approximately 15,000 cars, at no cost to the city, giving the city a new lens for analyzing transit need.

Democracy Challenge

Formulating responsive and effective public policy requires access to good information. In our era of big data and “digital exhaust,” there are incredible opportunities to identify residents’ needs and preferences and to monitor services in real time. However, managing that information has become exponentially more complex. In addition to legal, technical, and financial hurdles, there are new political tradeoffs. The way that a city government confronts (or skirts) issues such as data privacy, ownership, and access can have profound implications for trust and democratic representation.

How It Works & How They Did It

"The fundamental input you need to plan a city is the information about how people travel and where they travel to,” said Transportation Secretary Andres Archila. Prior to this initiative, Bogotá’s data gathering process was slow and ineffective. The city wanted to step up its traffic management and create a smooth, integrated transportation system. A visit to South Korea for a data conference sparked the idea to access private taxi data, but the journey from a common sense idea to an implementable policy was long.  

This experience demonstrated that cities do not necessarily need money to innovate, just creativity and an experimental approach. Launching small experiments or seizing the “adjacent possible” can also be a low-risk way to tackle otherwise daunting new projects. For Bogotá, obtaining an available, “off the shelf” data resource at no cost has provided an on ramp to begin building new technical capacities, modernizing planning processes, and updating legal frameworks around a core city service.

How’s It Going?

The Secretariat considered other uses of the Tappsi data, such as better targeting messages for the Secretariat’s Yo le doy ritmo a Bota (I give rhythm to Bogotá) campaign, which seeks to reduce gridlock caused by cars “blocking the box.” The data could also be useful in planning alternative transit. The Secretariat hired a “Bike Czar” to coordinate all of the City’s efforts to encourage bicycle usage, including a planned 25 kilometer bicycle highway, safety programs, and community outreach to cyclists.

Considerations

• Updating legal frameworks. Often, preexisting laws governing information management cannot easily accommodate novel data-sharing partnerships. In Bogotá, there was no precedent to follow. 
• Achieving data compatibility. Free data obtained “as is” is not necessarily compatible with government systems and could incur significant resources to process.   
• Moving from data to information. After resolving issues with data access and compatibility, Bogotá still had to grapple with how to extract useful, policy-relevant information from the data. They call this the challenge of squeezing “el jugo” (the juice) from the data.   
• Managing the public perception:
  • Trust. Bogotá officials feared a backlash from citizens suspicious of private sector involvement, including the potential for companies to receive unfair benefits or privileges. They recognized the need for confidence building measures, including transparency around the terms of the collaboration.    
  • Openness. Bogotá’s agreement does not open Tappsi’s traffic data to the public, a tradeoff that mitigates trade secret and privacy concerns but could undermine citizen confidence in policy decisions. It also forecloses the possibility of third parties helping to squeeze “el jugo” from the data.
  • Fairness. Selecting one vendor’s data could raise concerns that the government is intervening in a competitive market, absent a fair and open process to select the private partner. 
  • Privacy. Anonymizing Tappsi’s data was important to ensure that the transit habits of individual users would not be exposed. 
• Ensuring representation. As data begins to inform and drive public policy decisions to a larger and larger extent, questions about its provenance and processing become more important. Are populations occupying “data deserts” invisible to city planners? What assumptions and biases are built into data collection and analysis, and who makes key decisions about data collection and usage? 

Who Else Is Trying This?

• California, US: The nonprofit California Data Collaborative (CaDC) uses opensource software to automate the collection, analysis and storage of actual water usage data from participating agencies. Land planning agencies, cities, and water retailers can join the Collaborative to share their data and access interactive analytics tools and dashboards. Read more 
• Copenhagen, Denmark: The City of Copenhagen partnered with Hitachi to build a City Data Exchange, which uses a software-as-a-service model, to facilitate the sale, purchase and sharing of a wide variety of data from public and private sources. Its goal is to eliminate data silos and help the city reach its aggressive carbon reduction goals. Read more 
• Louisville, Kentucky, US: A group called AIR Louisville recruited asthmatics to test out GPS-enabled medication sensors that can pinpoint the location, time, and pollutants. This data is related to an app that healthcare professionals can see and allow them to intervene, in the worst cases of an attack. The app sends notifications about bad air quality to help patients troubleshoot asthma attacks. Read more 
• Global—Esri and Waze: Municipal governments can already access real-time traffic data through Waze’s Connected Citizens program. Waze has also partnered with Esri, a mapping service, so that governments can more easily contribute information, including real-time construction, crash, and road closure data. Read more 
• Global—OpenTraffic and SharedStreets: The Open Transport Partnership, which grew out of a World Bank pilot project in the Philippines, builds tools for public-private collaboration around open transport data. Founding partners include ride-sharing companies Easy Taxi, Grab, and Le.Taxi (which together carry millions of riders in more than 30 countries) along with the World Bank, National Association of City Transportation Officials, Mapzen, the World Resources Institute, Miovision, and NDrive. Related products include OpenTraffic and SharedStreets. 

Additional Reading

Who Owns Urban Mobility Data? 

Data Collaboratives: Creating Public Value by Exchanging Data 

This action was originally developed for Big Bold Cities, an initiative of Living Cities and the National Democratic Institute (NDI); republished here with the permission of Living Cities.