Motivating car-sharing services open-data mandatory APIs

Modern countries urban traffic is nowadays fought by introducing regulations to reduce private traffic: tolls, dedicated lanes, narrow lanes, low speed limits, reduced parking availability, etc. Some help can come from car-sharing, i.e., pools of shared vehicles to be rented for short periods of time. The authors scraped car-sharing vendors’ websites for a couple of years, made data uniform and then queried and graphed the dataset, a summary of results is presented. Car-sharing vendors should publish - in open data, mandatorily, through standardized API - data about the state of their vehicle pool because this data can be used to analyse the overall traffic behaviour in town and to study impacts, effectiveness and costs.