e-UMDS

The overall challenge of the project is to investigate how best to enable more data-driven decision making by policy stakeholders e.g., local government. A specific example is about local governments that sit on a huge wealth of extremely informative micro-mobility data, generated as a byproduct of e-bike and e-scooter rental schemes. Rarely, however, do these authorities have the expertise, resources or infrastructure to make the most of this data. A lack of understanding of the potential benefits, coupled with a fear of the (very real) consequences should something go wrong, could also hold back data sharing.

This project aims to overcome these challenges by 1) demonstrating ways such data can be used to inform policy making and 2) building a model Trusted Research Environment (TRE) required to handle such shared data safely. Having demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, the project then considers 3) how can TREs be scaled up to support other stakeholders and include other data sets. As a national facility, DAFNI can be a key enabler of these objectives both by facilitating the creation of TREs and by supporting their scale up. As part of this project,pathways are investigated that could be realised.

Bristol and the rest of the West of England Combine Authority (WECA) area operates one of the largest electric micromobility short term rental schemes anywhere in Europe. Roughly 10 million journeys are made each year, by roughly 100 thousand active users, across an operating area of 65km2. To make possible the operation of this fleet, the electric scooters and bicycles record and report back their location every 5s. This vehicle telematics data, produced as a byproduct of the scheme operation, therefore details every single journey made as part of the scheme. It provides visibility of not just the origin and destination of the journey, but the complete end-to-end route selection. This data could be extremely insightful, as people’s choice of route is governed not just by which is the shortest path, but a wide range of different factors such as safety, comfort and even the state of the infrastructure.