Passenger Services Member Network

This Member Network supports OMF member agencies, companies, and services convened to discuss work, policies, use cases, and needs around passenger services.

Learn more about Member Networks here.

Purpose

The MDS Working Group Steering Committee voted to organize the MDS Working Group into three Task Forces focused on progressing the technical work and specification of MDS 2.0.

The Modes Architecture Task Force (Modes TF) is tasked to update the MDS architecture to allow for new modes and add 3 proposed new modes for MDS 2.0, namely, passenger services, delivery robots, and carshare. While the technical work will continue to be done at the working group, the Modes TF may meet separately and use the Modes TF mailing list to advance certain topics before presentation to the working group. The Modes TF will work to simultaneously adapt the technical structure of MDS to adapt to new modes, as well as develop the specification for the new modes.

Active Work

The MDS Working Group, in public meetings and on GitHub, have been working to incorporate Passenger Services into the MDS 2.0 release work. This is after the success of creating the architectural framework to support multiple modes in MDS, and splitting Micromobility into its own mode.

This work is ready for extra scrutiny and feedback, to make sure we are capturing all the right mode attributes, vehicle states, and event types specific to passenger services. You can see the work in its entirety here, landing on the Passenger Services specific page, with the rest of the spec browsable to see how it connects to other parts of MDS.

There is also the opportunity to add optional data fields to the core of MDS that may be applicable to current city regulation of passenger services vehicles. For example, we know Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London and other cities in the US and global current require more fields for taxis like number of passengers, driver information like registration ID, vehicle tag, other vehicle properties beyond handicap accessibility, etc in their trip data.

Or there may be policy examples or regulations to express in this space that the current MDS Policy API fields don't capture.

Opportunity to provide any feedback as a general or inline comment on the suggested pull request.