5 Key Takeaways from MobilityData’s 2025 Paris Workshop
And Why You’ll Want to Join Us in Vancouver
In June 2025, MobilityData hosted our first Workshop of the year in Paris, the second ever in Europe, bringing together 65 participants from 15 different countries. From transit agencies and operators to National Access Points, tech vendors, and trip planning platforms, the room was filled with people committed to making sustainable transport options easier to find and access by using the most powerful tool at their disposal: data.
Over the course of two days, participants explored how GTFS, GBFS, NeTEx, and SIRI can work together to deliver better passenger information, shared success stories from around the globe, and tackled some of the trickiest technical and governance questions in mobility data today.
For those who couldn’t join us in Paris, here are five key takeaways and some of the reasons why you should start planning your trip to join us in Vancouver this October for the next Workshop!
1. When it Comes to Mobility Data Standards, Collaboration is Better Than Competition
The 2025 Workshop: Paris Edition brought together voices from across the world, each carrying local challenges, priorities, and lessons learned. This diversity didn’t lead to fragmentation; it sparked deeper conversations and revealed common ground.
Whether discussing GTFS’s efficiency for sharing information with riders in Europe, NeTEx and SIRI’s ability to handle complex network details, or GBFS’s streamlined approach for shared mobility, participants agreed: these standards are not rivals. They are complementary tools, each born from different contexts, governance models, and technical needs, but united by the same mission: making sustainable transport easy to discover, access, and use.
The real opportunity lies in connection, not competition. That means:
- Building interoperability through automatic converters, mappings that can clearly show what can be modeled in each format, and consistent identifier management.
- Establishing connections between the different governance models can help ensure long-term interoperability and reduce fragmentation.
Each format has a purpose, but the most powerful solutions emerge when the data can be expressed in different formats based on what it’s needed for.
Bringing together diverse perspectives help us to see the bigger picture, while collaboration between standards ensures we can act on it. Together, they create stronger, more connected mobility ecosystems.
2. Documentation and Data Quality Matter
Standards are a shared language, but only if everyone agrees on what the words mean. Clear documentation, practical guidance, and consistent interpretation are essential for delivering passenger information that is accurate, complete, and reflects the reality on the ground.
Data quality is more than meeting compliance checklists. It’s about ensuring that what’s in the data feed matches what passengers experience in real time. Open-source tools, like MobilityData’s GTFS and GBFS validators, play an important role, but lasting improvement also depends on collaboration including refining specifications, sharing best practices, and level setting expectations across the ecosystem.
When producers and consumers of data share the same understanding, passengers benefit from information they can trust.
3. Sharing Success Turns It Into a Community Asset
In the rush to solve persistent data problems, it’s easy to overlook what’s already going right. The 2025 Workshop: Paris Edition served as a welcomed reminder that celebrating wins, big and small, is just as important as fixing gaps.
Participants shared examples of successful implementations, from cities rolling out updated GBFS feeds that improved rider experience overnight, to transit agencies using the MoblityData GTFS validator to systematically clean and maintain their datasets. Several attendees highlighted how these successes not only improved passenger information locally, but have also inspired similar efforts in other regions.
Many of the challenges discussed in Paris are shared worldwide, meaning that every solution has the potential to be replicated, adapted, and scaled elsewhere. That’s why MobilityData launched the new #awesome-data Slack channel during the Workshop, a dedicated space for spotlighting projects, feeds, and processes worth emulating. We’re already starting to see some stories of agencies and operators that are getting it right. If you’re not already on our Slack, sign up to join here!
By making room to celebrate progress, we’re not just sharing praises, we’re building a library of practical, real-world examples that others can draw on. Every solved problem becomes a gift to the community when it’s shared, and facilitating those connections is one of our core missions at MobilityData.
4. The Mobility Data Community is Growing and Becoming More Influential
One of the clearest signals from the 2025 Workshop: Paris Edition was just how far the mobility data movement has come. Shared mobility session participation alone saw an astronomical jump, more than 35 attendees compared to just a handful two years ago. This surge is a clear sign of growing momentum in shared mobility – bikeshare, scooter share, car share – and of how important these conversations have become for those working to expand sustainable mobility options.
But it wasn’t just about numbers. The room was filled with people who have the power to make real change, from high-level decision-makers to the boots on the ground people shaping the day-to-day experience for riders. Conversations weren’t hypothetical; they were grounded in real projects, live challenges, and solutions ready to be tested.
The takeaway? The mobility data community is not only expanding, it’s becoming more influential. The ideas exchanged in Paris are poised to ripple outward and shape local policies, informing product roadmaps, and setting the tone for how standards are implemented around the world.
5. Membership Makes This Possible
These Workshops wouldn’t exist without the support from MobilityData’s Members. Our Members make it possible to host our Workshops and Summits where our team works hard to bring together industry leaders to collaborate, share solutions, and set the course for the future of transportation. By supporting MobilityData, Members ensure that data standards evolve to meet real-world needs, making transit and mobility more accessible, efficient, and reliable across the globe. Additionally, by joining our organization, they’re funding the development of good governance for open source management which is critical to adjust and scale these standards.
Not only do Members support this critical work, but they also become key contributors in building a connected, data-driven transit ecosystem that spans continents and serves communities of every size. As Joaquín Pena from Member organization Swiftly put it, “MobilityData is key for our industry and helps us think ahead of time and the challenges we may face [in the future]. MobilityData also brings different learnings from other implemented use cases from different countries and different regions that we aren’t aware of in our day to day. This is key for the development of sustainable transport.”
We were thrilled to have so many Member organizations represented at the 2025 Workshop: Paris Edition including: Transit App, triptix GmbH, Entur, enRoute, La Fabrique des Mobilités, Deutsche Bahn AG, transport.data.gouv.fr, PTV Planung Transport Verkehr GmbH, Aurige, Belgian Mobility Company, SMMAG, Mitfahrverband e.V., NVBW, CityBikes, Google, French Ministry of Transport, Aubin MaaS Limited, Ito World, and Citymapper.
MobilityData membership is essential for those who want to drive meaningful progress in the industry. Check out more about becoming a MobilityData Member!
Next Stop: Vancouver
The 2025 Workshop: Paris Edition proved once again that when you bring the right mix of people together, real progress happens. Not just in theory, but in practical steps forward.
We’re carrying that momentum to Vancouver on October 7-8, 2025 for our next MobilityData hosted Workshop!
If you want to be part of the conversations shaping the future of mobility data standards, and see firsthand how collaboration drives change, we’d love to see you there.
Learn more about our 2025 Workshop: Vancouver Edition and reserve your early bird ticket at the discounted rate today.
