Why cities must look to private-sector data sources

Data, as most anyone in IT will tell you, is driving innovation. Vast troves of data are at the heart of developments involving artificial intelligence, driverless cars and other breakthrough technologies. Government too has shown the value of bigger, better and more open data, but developments in who collects all this information could prove useful to local planning efforts, according to a new Brookings Institute report.

In the past, the agencies themselves have typically been the main source for, or at least directly involved with, collecting government-relevant data — whether the goal was using information from the Centers for Disease Control to study the opioid epidemic, or looking to data from sensors to seek insights about asthma.

The Brookings report, however, asserted that the tables are turning with regard to who has the best datasets. Much more data is being collected by apps like Yelp and financial institutions like Mastercard, and all of these data could have a big impact on how cities plan for transportation and land use, the study found.

“It requires a major culture shift to recognize that Google — via its mapping division — now knows more about where people move on a daily basis than their peers in local government who build the roads, rails, and sidewalks that facilitate such travel,” the report said.

Information from people’s smartphones, vehicles, fitness trackers, credit cards and map searches have the potential to provide cities with “geospatial movement data at a scale never seen before.”

Brookings found that cities’ current method of collecting information on daily travel habits tend to look only at macro-level commuting patterns, and that the data is collected in the form of surveys that can be outdated by the time they’re released. But digital data can provide a more up-to-date picture of movement within a city or state.

At least one private company has already recognized the value of the data it collects.