// the find
openmobilityfoundation/mobility-data-specification
A data specification to enable right-of-way regulation, digital policy, geofencing, and two-way communication between mobility companies and public agencies worldwide for any regulated, shared vehicle.
MDS is a REST API specification — not a library or tool — that standardizes how cities and micromobility/rideshare operators exchange operational data. Think GTFS but for real-time vehicle management, geofencing, and digital policy enforcement. It's for city transportation agencies and the companies (Lime, Bird, Lyft, etc.) that need to talk to them.
Real-world adoption is genuine: 200+ cities across 21 countries and most major providers have implemented it, which is rare for a government-adjacent open standard. The bidirectional design (Provider API for pull, Agency API for push) is well-thought-out and reflects how these relationships actually work operationally. The Policy API turning city rules into machine-readable JSON that providers can query is legitimately clever — 'policy as code' for speed limits and geofences is the right abstraction. OpenAPI schemas were added in 2.0, which makes validation and code generation tractable instead of just hoping everyone reads the markdown correctly.
This is a specification repo, not an implementation — there is no reference server, no SDK, and no test harness in this repository, so you're building from scratch against markdown docs and JSON schema files. The six separate APIs (provider, agency, policy, geography, jurisdiction, metrics) with overlapping concerns make the onboarding surface area large; getting a compliant implementation of even two of them right is non-trivial. Privacy handling is entirely delegated to guidance documents and 'principles' rather than being enforced by the spec itself, which means two compliant implementations can have wildly different data retention and access behaviors. Version fragmentation is a real operational problem — the spec is at 2.0 but cities are contractually locked to older versions, and the version guidance document exists specifically because upgrade coordination between cities and providers in the real world is painful.