May 5, 2016
Data on Wheels in Mexico City
Mexico City’s nine million residents got a big boost from our 2015 mobility challenge winners. Now Ford is asking developers to take another look at Mexico City’s transit network — with data.
The Ford Mexico Smart Journey hackathon is offering $30,000 in cash prizes for apps that leverage public, private, and crowd-sourced transit data to help Mexico City commuters figure out the best way to get to their destination based on factors like current traffic, safety, cost, travel time, and ease of use.
To get a better idea of the challenges Mexico City travelers face every day, and to find out more about how hackers can use data to make commuting better, we talked to a few mobility tech experts in the D.F.
Daniel Tello, Technological Innovation, Laboratorio para la Ciudad
Paco Valdez, CTO, SinTráfico
Peatónito, mobility superhero and pedestrian advocate
Francisco Sordo, CEO, Uber México
What’s your favorite way to get around Mexico City?
DT: Bike. Using ECOBICI, Mexico City’s bike sharing program, gives you the flexibility to move wherever you want and the comfort of leaving the bike in a station.
PV: Bicycle. Since the introduction of ECOBICI, bicycling is one of the best alternatives to avoid traffic congestion and saturation of transit system.
P: Bicycle.
FS: As the CEO of Uber in Mexico, I have had to use a full range of mobility options in order to gain deeper knowledge of the problems that citizens in my city face on a daily basis to get from point A to point B. And definitely my favorite way to commute is uberPOOL: it’s eco-friendly and the most efficient way to reduce the amount of cars on my city’s streets.
In your opinion, what is the biggest transit problem facing Mexico City residents and visitors on a daily basis?
DT: The biggest transit problem we face are the unpredictable variables around public transportation. It’s pretty inconsistent; you can wait up to 15 minutes until your transport arrives, or maybe 5 minutes. This uncertainty gives the impression that public transport is not efficient.
Metro, the Mexico City subway, moves more than 5 million people every day (2 times the population of Chicago) with only 12 lines. I always think twice before saying the subway system in Mexico City is not efficient; it’s a complex issue.
PV: Accessibility to rapid transportation systems; not all areas of the city are connected to the Metro and BRT networks.
P: The excessive use of cars.
FS: The average number of people riding in a car in Mexico City is 1.2. This definitely creates congestion and pollution, and seriously affects mobility. We need to put more people in fewer cars.
We are working diligently on communicating the message that driving alone in your car is no longer an affordable privilege. We all need to be conscious about the current environmental and mobility situation in our cities and make sharing our rides part of life.
What are some of the ways software developers and data engineers could use transit data to help residents make real-time transportation decisions?
DT: Mexico City is a place with difficult challenges but it is also presents big opportunities. Engineers have the chance to fill the gaps and build solutions that can disrupt the way everyone uses city services.
PV: Most transportation decisions are made with empirical knowledge in Mexico City, so a lot of improvement can be done just by standardizing this data in technology platforms and by using real-time data analysis for day-to-day transportation decisions.
P: Make cars more expensive to use by charging for pollution or charging for vehicle mileage.
FS: Uber’s technology facilitates efficient rides because it allows us to have a more exact comprehension of demand in real time. Also, it lets us know current traffic conditions, estimated time of arrival, and suggested price before you begin your travel in your city’s streets.
Uber complements public transit options, and developers and data engineers could leverage the information to design end-to-end multimodal transportation routes that include public transit as well as options like Uber and walking.
What are your suggestions for researching and approaching the available data resources?
DT: You can get the most value out of the data by cross-referencing multiple databases. For example, using only the GTFS information that Semovi, the mobility secretariat, provides is something that most of the apps in the market do, but they don’t add any new value. Using multiple databases can help you analyze the data in a different way and you’ll be able to see patterns that were not visible at first.
PV: One of the biggest challenges that developers that are working towards mobility solutions have is the lack of data in Mexico, so relying on specialized analytics and data providers such as SinTráfico, which offer solutions powered by high-quality data, is a great alternative for maximizing the value of their developments.
P: The problem is that there’s not enough good data, so that would be a good challenge, how to create data with new technologies.
FS: The solution is summarized in one simple statement: Through technology, have more people in fewer cars. My suggestion would be to approach data mining and research along these same lines. How can we make people’s lives easier? How do we optimize the resources that are available today in our cities? How do we think about the future and use the information available to us today to bridge that gap?
