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Data Specifications Field Scan
The following is a survey of data specifications and related projects that are likely of relevance to the National Collaboration on Bicycle, Pedestrian and Accessibility Infrastructure Data (NC-BPAID).
By understanding the broad landscape of data initiatives related to the bicycle, pedestrian, and accessibility data space, we can work together to improve data standardization and support a range of use cases, including asset management, routing, safety, network analysis, AI and automation, and more.
Mapping out these existing efforts can help us understand:
- Which efforts are most similar to ours?
- Where do we need to design for interoperability and interchangeability?
- What efforts have scale we can build on? Where are our target users already gathering, and what specifications are they already using?
This document highlights the most widely adopted, similar, and overlapping initiatives in depth. It continues with a more extensive list of related specifications.
The insights gained from this survey will inform future initiatives and support the overall goal of advancing bicycle, pedestrian, and accessibility infrastructure data.
The following specifications and projects have the most overlapping scope with the vision of NC-BPAID. No scope has 100% overlap. Most only handle select aspects of bike, pedestrian, and accessibility data. Many lack granularity. Adoption varies.
These specifications may provide inspiration to NC-BPAID, and are good candidates for crosswalks and other approaches to enable easy exchange of data between formats.
| Project website | zephyr-data-specs.github.io/GMNS/ |
|---|---|
| Project community | github.com/zephyr-data-specs/GMNS/ |
| Founded | 2020 |
| Adoption status | The General Modeling Network Specification (GMNS) has seen limited adoption, primarily in an academic and open-source setting. Users include the Arizona State University transportation program and the Volpe Resilience and Disaster Recovery Tool Suite. A GMNS importer has been developed for the AequilibraE open-source travel modeling suite of tools. Volpe has demonstrated bicycle / pedestrian access-to-destination capabilities in a small network derived from OpenStreetMap. |
| Standards recognition | - |
| Function | Facilitate multi-resolution and multi-modal data exchange among projects and agencies, to avoid developing networks from scratch with every new project. It is an extensible specification aimed at describing the entire transportation space, including physical elements, traffic controls and time varying policy elements. |
| Transportation scope |
GMNS includes representations of the physical transportation space (e.g., links, lanes, intersections, sidewalks, points of interest along a link), traffic controls (including signals) and time-varying policy elements (e.g., part-time lanes, restrictions on link or lane usage). It covers bicycle and pedestrian data at varying degrees of detail depending on data availability. Bicycle and pedestrian facilities may either be modeled as attributes of a road link or as their own links. Extensions would be needed to cover accessibility in detail. |
| Openness | The specification is publicly available. Project is under the auspices of the Zephyr Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to advance “rigorous transportation and land use decision-making for the public good by advocating for and supporting improved travel analysis, and facilitating its implementation.” The Volpe Center provides day-to-day support under a project sponsored by the FHWA Office of Planning. |
| Data representation | Graph, with linear referencing elements within links to locate points of interest (e.g., pocket lanes, bus stops). |
| Scale (data coverage or users) | Unclear; projects in Arizona and San Francisco area may be mapping locally. |
2024 updates:
- GMNS is a reference specification in the upcoming version 2 of the Applications of Enterprise GIS for Transportation (AEGIST) Guidebook | FHWA, targeting State DOTs.
Arizona State University and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (San Francisco area MPO) received a large National Science Foundation grant, under NSF’s Pathways to Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, to enhance GMNS and promote its adoption. Planned activities include pedestrian, bicycle and transit enhancements as well as integrating GMNS with Network Wrangler, a version control tool for managing project-related updates to travel networks.
| Project website | register.apple.com/resources/imdf/ |
|---|---|
| Project community | No central platform. |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Adoption status | Several big tech consumer apps, likely hundreds of data producers.
|
| Standards recognition | Open Geospatial Consortium recognized IDMF 1.0.0 as a Community Standard from 2021-02. |
| Function | Indoor mapping. Primarily used to create accurate, geo-referenced digital maps of indoor spaces. It’s often adopted for use in buildings like airports, malls, stadiums, arenas, and other complex indoor environments. |
| Transportation scope | Pedestrian and accessibility. |
| Openness |
No open governance. Some open use allowed. Project under custom free use terms. Most data appears to be licensed proprietarily. |
| Data representation | Linear (GeoJSON) w/ Graph-like relationships between spaces (e.g. various stories of a building). Output is a .zip folder of GeoJSON files. |
| Scale (data coverage or users) | Large venues, e.g. stadiums, museums, airports, malls, etc. NYC Dept. of Technology. |
2024 updates:
- Spec is stable (still in version 1.0.0). No changes, nor public conversations about changes.
- Adoption rapidly expanding to additional data consuming applications including Microsoft Places.
| Project website | https://tcat.cs.washington.edu/opensidewalks/ |
|---|---|
| Project community | github.com/OpenSidewalks |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Adoption status | The AccessMap app is the initial primary data consumer. The public repository of data on the project Github appears outdated. There are no other known public repositories. The AccessMap app has coverage of areas of cities in California, DC, Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon, Ohio, Washington, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador: all may be using OpenSidewalks. |
| Standards recognition | - |
| Function | Internationally distributed pedestrian/bike transport graph layer, including infrastructure data for accessibility, safety, and pedestrian preferences. Includes extended attributes for advanced accessibility and route planning features. Builds on OSM's tagging schema and community mapper model. |
| Transportation scope | Bicycle, pedestrian, and accessibility data covered in detail. |
| Openness | Project owned and governed by the University of Washington; feedback is solicited on tools and schema. |
| Data representation | Graph |
| Scale (data coverage or users) | Based on Open Street Maps, with enhanced data. |
| Project website | openstreetmap.org/about |
|---|---|
| Project community |
Communities are organized decentrally.
|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Adoption status |
Global crowdsourced coverage on openstreetmap.org and consumer apps including Apple, Baidu, and VK. Data consumers: openstreetmap.org front end, OSM's list, and consumer apps as well as embedded third party services including Apple Maps (e.g. Booking.com), Mapbox (e.g. Uber, Strava), Baidu, VK. Data producers: OSM is generally crowd-sourced. Contributors have built global coverage quality of pedestrian, accessibility, and bicycle with wide variations in level of detail. |
| Standards recognition | - |
| Function | Crowd-source a free, editable map of the world, widely used for various applications, including routing, research, and geographic analysis. |
| Transportation scope | OSM covers bicycle, pedestrian, and accessibility aspects. The quality of each can vary by contributor, geography and other factors. See the Pedestrian Working Group note below. |
| Openness | Open and independently hosted by the OpenStreetMap foundation. Many sensitive government and commercial applications find the shareback requirements of the ODbL license too burdensome to be worth using OSM and have challenged the community’s limited interest in expanding to additional uses of OSM data leading to the creation of projects like Overture Maps and Open Sidewalks. |
| Data representation | Linear reference system. |
| Scale (data coverage or users) | Global, city to entire countries. |
OSM-related projects:
- OSM BNA Guide (OpenStreetMap Editing Guide for the Bicycle Network Analysis). Guide published by PeopleForBikes in 2018 on editing OpenStreetMap data to support the Bicycle Network Analysis, used to evaluate connectivity and safety of bicycle infrastructure.
- OSM US Pedestrian Working Group. US working group focused on improving pedestrian data and standards in OpenStreetMap, with aims to enhance mapping accuracy for pedestrian infrastructure. This effort is refining OSM’s pedestrian data structures and will provide new guidance for OSM contributors.
- Overture Maps (elsewhere in this section).
- OpenSidewalks (elsewhere in this section).
| Project website | overturemaps.org |
|---|---|
| Project community | github.com/OvertureMaps |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Adoption status | Major consumer apps are both contributing data and consuming data including Meta, Tom Tom, Microsoft, Esri, and Amazon. |
| Standards recognition | - |
| Function | Create interoperable, open spatial data that allows for the use of multiple data inventories and standards. |
| Transportation scope | Footway (sidewalk) data is widespread internationally. Cycleway data is limited. |
| Openness | The project is open and independently managed via a Linux Foundation subsidiary. Data licensing has been thoughtful. |
| Data representation | Linear reference system. |
| Scale (data coverage or users) | Based on OSM (elsewhere in this section); draws on OSM but includes enhanced data in limited places. |
2024 updates:
- Numerous data releases containing hundreds of millions of entities.
These specifications have seen more limited adoption than those listed above.
- Shared-row. Data standard for shared road infrastructure with designated pedestrian/bicycle areas. Led by David Wasserman. Implementation unknown.
- Schéma de données d'aménagements cyclables and Schéma de données pour le stationnement cyclable. Community-driven standardization project led by France Transport Ministry for bike data. Successful standardization of data achieved in about 2 years. Open source project eager to be internationalized. Project GitHub. Geovelo has built a popular bike routing app consuming this data.
- Statewide Trails Data Standard (Massachusetts). Schema offering a way of describing trails and sharing trails data that is simple at its core and useful for general (i.e., statewide) purposes, while remaining flexible/extensible enough for more specialized/local use cases. Implementation unknown.
In addition, NCHRP 07-31 State DOT and Tribal Use of Active Transportation Data: Practices, Sources, Needs, and Gaps is delving into active transportation infrastructure data. While not focused on developing specifications, it will likely surface useful information for development, adoption and data management. USD $800k in grant funding, under active development.
These specifications are potentially good candidates for interoperability. They cover other types of transportation infrastructure, and they contain elements that may also appear in the specifications developed by NC-BPAID. These specifications have been widely adopted and are consistently maintained.
- CityGML. International specification for virtual 3D city models that covers a range of urban features. Managed by the Open Geospatial Forum and can be easily imported into ESRI / ArcGIS and Autodesk. Integrates with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and digital twins, covers indoor and outdoor spaces, and can be used for navigation and other applications.
- Curb Data Specification (CDS). Data specification for expressing “dynamic curb zones” to improve parking, especially for delivery vehicles and passenger loading. Pilot implementations in about a dozen US cities.
- General Bike Feed Specification (GBFS). GBFS represents the availability of docked and free-floating bikeshare, scootershare, and carshare. Connects data from bikeshare systems to consumer journey planning apps. Very widespread adoption by major journey planners like Moovit, Transit (app), Citymapper, Google Maps. Datasets for hundreds of bikeshare systems around the world.
- GTFS-Pathways (General Transit Feed Specification). GTFS is the data specification used to relay data from 10,000 public transit agencies globally (over 1,000 in the US) to provide public transportation information in hundreds of consumer apps from most major tech companies. GTFS-Pathways data is available for a subset of those agencies and describes the layout and accessibility of transit stations.
- Mobility Data Specification (MDS). API standard for public right-of-way management. MDS is focused on managing mobility services such as dockless scooters, bicycles, mopeds, car share, delivery robots, and passenger services. In use by several dozen cities and mobility operators.
- National Bicycle Network. Managed by the Federal Highway Administration and is working to compile bicycle route geospatial data for the entire nation, based on data released by public agencies. Has a data template available for download that covers suggested formatting and attributes, and FHWA has historically offered assistance with data standardization.
These specifications and projects are worth keeping on our radar. They operate in different spaces or geographies than NC-BPAID’s vision but may have useful elements or practices.
- APDS (Alliance for Parking Data Standards). ISO-recognized standard in international use for parking data.
- Architecture Reference for Cooperative and Intelligent Transportation (ARC-IT). ITS-focused reference architecture for planners and engineers.
- CDS-M (City Data Specification for Mobility). Standardised way to communicate data between transport operators and the government departments on whose infrastructure they operate.
- CurbLR. Data standard for describing curb regulations. Last active development was in 2020.
- INSPIRE. European data standard covering a range of geographic data.
- ISO GDF 5.1. Standardizes geographic data formats for Intelligent Transport Systems, ensuring interoperability between automated driving systems, Cooperative ITS, and multi-modal transport.
- SAE J2735 V2X Communications Message Set Dictionary. This SAE standard specifies a message set, and its data frames and data elements, for use by applications that use vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications systems.
- Transmodel including NeTEx, SIRI, DATEX II. European Union imposed standards for multimodal journey planning. Adoption in a handful of European countries. Includes information on transit station accessibility.