By: Scott Pietka
In car-dominated San Diego, the arrival of scooters offered a more nimble and exciting way for people to explore its neighborhoods. As the number of scooters available from different on-demand rental outfitters soared to around 19,000, a parking problem developed. Scooter customers, with little guidance, would park scooters just about anywhere on city streets and sidewalks after completing a ride.
The City’s remedy was to paint more than 500 scooter-designated parking corrals on its streets. While these corrals consolidated scooters in a more orderly manner, scooter operators like Lyft became responsible for moving the corralled scooters in tandem with the City’s complicated street sweeping schedule. Failure to comply with the schedule meant Lyft was risking $1,000 fines, impounded scooters, and a good relationship with the city officials.
Getting the Wheels Turning
Lyft Operations Manager James Boshers worked with the Mapbox Solutions Architecture team to combine Mapbox’s Map and its Tileset API with San Diego City data and Lyft user data. The result is a proprietary mapping interface showing the relationship between the corrals and a dynamically updating street sweeping schedule. Mapbox was able to quickly ingest hundreds of pages of detailed street sweeping schedules, creating a powerful and elegant visualization of Lyft’s nightly scooter corralling challenges.
Scooting Towards a Solution
The first step in this process was to convert all the corral and street information into a Mapbox tileset. This helped simplify the overall app and maintain a high level of performance in the field.
Once a month, Lyft downloads the City’s sweep schedule and converts it into ‘Active’ zones. Then a new map is programmatically created every weekday afternoon, overlaying all scooter corrals with the streets being swept. Essential details like which side of the street is being swept, scheduled sweep times, and cross streets make for a clear picture of the work the contractors moving the scooters need to accomplish. This data is synced to the Google Cloud Platform and consumed by the field application, so all users have the right data at the right time.
As Lyft operators navigate the streets, data is transmitted back in real-time back to Lyft, where it is synced to the cloud. The app consumes this data and displays a percentage of corrals and streets cleared in the top left corner of the map. If a customer drops-off a Lyft scooter in a corral that was previously cleared, GPS trace data automatically updates the map to the corresponding corral. The corral’s color turns red and creates an in-map alert for the contractors to retrieve the scooter easily.
A Smooth Ride
Back at Lyft’s warehouse, Shift Leads use Lyft’s advanced reporting to monitor all the contractor’s progress and its customer rides. Shift Leads follow along with the driver’s progress in real-time on the map. Once all the corrals are cleared, changing from red to green on the map, they can call it a night.
This solution does more than only help Lyft manage its San Diego scooter fleet; it creates a strong partnership with the City of San Diego. The City can also view the dashboard, creating full transparency into Lyft’s management of its scooter fleet. Additionally, Lyft avoids fines, the City more easily completes its street sweeping work, and the people of San Diego have access to micro-mobility transportation options.
Mapbox’s strength extends far beyond its products. Lyft’s willingness to engage with Mapbox’s teams led to a thoughtfully crafted solution that’s effective and efficient. Next time you’re in San Diego and you see the pink wheels of a Lyft scooter, you’ll know that you have the option to explore thanks to a solution powered by Mapbox.
Scott J Pietka - Senior Technical Account Manager - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Scooters vs. Sweepers: How Lyft & Mapbox solved San Diego was originally published in maps for developers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.