How Los Angeles wants to manage bikes and scooters with data

The Los Angeles transportation department and Remix, a startup that provides planning tools to cities, have inked a partnership with scooter and bike companies Lime and Spin as part of its push for a mobility data standard.

Driving the news: Earlier this year, Los Angeles announced it wants to create a data standard for transportation modes like shared bikes and scooters. The standard, dubbed the “mobility data specification,” aims to make it easier for cities use the companies’ data to monitor activity, enforce rule violations, and communicate needs such as a lack of vehicles in a particular area.

Remix’s new tools for monitoring and managing bike and scooter services aims to help cities see where exactly the vehicles are, and what that means for public transit, access for residents, and so on.

• Bird, a scooter startup that’s not part of this partnership, recently unveiled its own dashboard for cities with data about its vehicles.
• While Los Angeles will be the first city where this data standard is deployed, officials hope other cities adopt it too. Remix says it plans to continue working with Spin and Lime in other cities as well.

The bottom line: As cities embrace (or begrudgingly accept) new transportation options like electric scooters, they’re seeking more control compared to when they had when ride-hailing companies rolled out years ago, and this time they want data.

Go deeper: Still smarting from Uber, cities wise up about scooter data