MDS Vehicles
A guide for how the real-time MDS Provider Vehicles status endpoint can be used to help cities manage fleets of devices anywhere in the public right of way.
MDS is a modular 'kit of parts' standard and cities can choose to use the only parts they need.
A city can choose to use just Vehicles as its only MDS tool.
Vehicles is authenticated and secure between the mobility service provider and the city agency, so it contains some more information than GBFS (like static vehicle IDs).
How the MDS vehicles fields map to the GBFS free bike status fields.
Chart of items that are significantly divergent between GBFS and MDS’s real-time status endpoints.
| MDS - Provider vehicles v1.0.0 | GBFS - free_bike_status v2.1rc | |
|---|---|---|
| Identifier | Unchanging vehicle ID | Randomized vehicle IDs |
| Vehicle State | 5 states including removed, on trip, outside jurisdiction, or unknown. | 4 combinations via available and disabled states |
| Vehicle Event | 26 events including rebalancing, maintenance, off hours, reserved, cancelled trips, comms lost, and low or charged battery | Not applicable |
| Visibility | Private: for internal city management and policy enforcement | Public: visible to all |
For a full chart of all fields with more details, and a link to presentation slides, see this supporting MDS / GBFS Real-time Status Comparison Document.
There are some fields that are included with Vehicles that are not in Free Bike Status:
- Static vehicle ID
- Important to track how devices are used around a city and how companies are managing them.
- More vehicle information around non-public operations (company drop off, maintenance, rebalance, missing)
- This is important to know about vehicles that are in the public right of way (streets, sidewalks, parks, etc) and what the provider knows about them. These vehicles are not available to be ridden and hence not visible in a public data feed.
- Battery percent (instead of estimated range)
- Current percent of battery level on the device.
For general differences between MDS and GBFS, see our detailed guide.
