Managing Mobility Data is a short guide from the National Association of City Transportation Officials and the International Municipal Lawyers Association that sets out principles and best practices for sharing, protecting, and managing mobility data.

The document 1 discusses the challenges of balancing the need for information with providing adequate privacy protection. It has an excellent discussion on how geo-specific trip data can become Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which is why such data needs to be treated as sensitive information. 

The document defines and discusses four principles for managing mobility data: Public Good, Protected, Purposeful, and Portable. Specific, actionable best practices for public agencies are provided to put each principle into practice. It then provides additional, more detailed best practices for data governance and data management. The document concludes with examples of the types of questions that public agencies wish to address through the collection of mobility data, broken out into planning, oversight, analysis, and enforcement topics.

As an example, the Purposeful principle is defined as needing to have clearly defined the types of questions that they are seeking to answer and map their data requests to those needs. Four high-level recommendations are then discussed, including developing an internal capacity to audit the data to ensure its accuracy. 

Specific, bulleted examples of best practices, such as “aggregate all geospatial data before committing it to permanent storage” are provided for seven areas: storage, sharing, access, oversight, expanding staff capacity, data aggregation, and common data queries.

An additional resource for readers includes a chapter of a broader guide 2 that provides a high-level overview of best practices for managing micromobility data.

  • 1National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and the International Municipal Lawyers Association (IMLA). (2019, April). Managing Mobility Data. Retrieved from NACTO: https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/NACTO_IMLA_Managing-Mobility-Data.pdf
  • 2Guidelines for Regulating Shared Micromobility (Chapter 5, Mobility Data and User Privacy), NACTO, https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NACTO_Shared_Micromobility Guidelines_Web.pdf, September 2019