Helping Cities Get Mobility Right
- Brooks McKinney, APR
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
OMF's Aylene McCallum urges cities to use new digital data standards to connect with shared-mobility providers and improve the safety and equity of public rights-of-way.
At age five, Aylene McCallum, a Milwaukie, Ore. native, visited her grandparents’ home near Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. for the first time. One day, her dad and grandpa invited her to tag along on a trip to the local grocery store, about a 15-minute drive. As they got back into their car for the return trip, Aylene’s dad joked, “Hey, let’s see if Aylene can get us back.”
At first, her grandfather laughed. But then she began giving directions: turn left, go straight, turn right at the next light—all the way home without missing a turn.
“My dad and grandpa were both thinking, ‘OMG, who is this girl?’” McCallum recalls. “I’ve always had an amazing sense of direction. I think it’s because I notice transportation details that others often ignore.”
Pitching New Standards
Today, as the director of partnerships and development for the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), a nonprofit, McCallum is helping cities and transportation companies worldwide navigate a new world of digital infrastructure. That new reality is anchored by two open-source data standards: the Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and the Curb Data Specification (CDS).
MDS is an API-based data standard that defines how cities and shared mobility service providers (e-scooters, bike share, etc.) format and share operational data. It allows cities to monitor and regulate mobility services in public rights-of-way.
And it gives mobility companies a consistent and efficient way to communicate with cities about the rules governing those rights-of-way, whether they are in Los Angeles, Stockholm, or Bogotá.
By contrast, CDS focuses on the curb. It effectively digitizes a city’s curb space, replacing static, often-confusing parking signs with a digital map. CDS shows ride-hail drivers, freight delivery operators and others competing for limited curb space where they can stop or park, for how long, and under what conditions.
“Cities are tasked with managing public rights-of-way, which are city-owned property,” McCallum explains. “MDS and CDS allow cities to make the most of those public spaces while ensuring transportation services are being operated safely and equitably across a city.”
Privacy, she adds, is built into the standards. Data collected through MDS and CDS focuses on vehicles rather than individual riders, and tracking typically occurs only during discrete events such as leaving or arriving at a destination, rather than through continuous monitoring.
Connecting Curiosity to Leadership
McCallum grew up in the 1980s, the oldest of three girls raised by a medical sciences liaison (her dad), and a CPA (her mom). As a young girl, she was fascinated with how local streets worked.
“‘Why did that light just turn red? Why does traffic always back up here at this time of day? What is this new transportation project going to be? Is it going to be a bike lane?” she wondered.
As she grew older, McCallum began to realize that her keen navigational skills—her dad likened her to a homing pigeon—also positioned her for leadership roles; i.e., the ability to guide people “turn-by-turn” toward a shared goal.
She first noticed this connection while serving as a production manager for her high school’s theater program.
“I spent time talking to actors and stage managers, working with the publicity team, and coordinating everything needed to put on the show,” she recalls. “I was always drawn to ushering people along a journey to help them achieve their vision.”
Discovering Transportation Policy
For college, McCallum’s leadership instincts guided her to the University of Denver (DU), where she majored in communications and public policy with a minor in leadership studies.
It was also here, at the foot of the Rockies, that her life began to intersect more explicitly with transportation policy. A class in federal budget policy during her senior year made all the difference.
“For the class, my classmates and I had to build and balance a federal budget, or come up with reasons why we weren’t going to balance it,” McCallum remembers. “Serendipitously, I was assigned the transportation, environment, and community-building portions of the budget.”
After researching the budget impacts of changes to these federal policy areas, she boldly proposed a five-cent-per-gallon increase in the federal gas tax, a tax that has remained unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993.
“I wanted to bring in extra money to the federal government, then reallocate it to states and cities to develop transportation infrastructure that would rely less on single-occupancy vehicles,” McCallum recalls. “By reducing gas consumption, my proposal would also have implications for community building and environmental projects.”
The exercise—McCallum’s professor hated her idea but gave her an A in the class—made her realize that she was actually quite interested in transportation. She graduated DU in June 2000 with a double major Bachelor of Arts degree in communications and public policy.
Trying On Different Lifestyles
After college, McCallum worked for a year in the Portland, Ore. office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). But then, eager to experience life on the East Coast, she took a job with an immigration law firm in Boston. Living there during the final stages of the Big Dig (one of the most expensive and most controversial transportation projects in U.S. history) only deepened McCallum's interest in transportation and urban planning.
“I loved not owning a car and exploring the city by walking or taking the 'T' [MBTA, Boston’s local public transit system],” she reminisces. “Once I tasted that freedom, I wanted to unlock the experience for other people.”
Digging Into Denver
But then, McCallum explains, “it was time to go back to the real world. I was either going to move back to Portland to pursue an advanced degree or move back to Denver to work in the field of transportation, whichever came first.”
In the end, Denver won. She answered a Craigslist ad and received a job offer from Transportation Solutions, a small transportation management association in Denver.
For the next three years, McCallum promoted alternative, non-car-based transportation options to DU students and faculty. She also helped secure federal grants for transit improvements in the Denver metropolitan area.
Focusing on Doing
In early 2006, McCallum moved to the Downtown Denver Partnership (DDP), a nonprofit, private-sector-led group focused on strengthening the economic vitality of the city’s urban core. Over the next 17 years, through multiple DDP positions, she inspired, guided, and led significant changes to the city’s transportation infrastructure.
One of her signature achievements was creating and leading DDP’s Urban Exploration Program. This annual, three-day program sends cohorts of Denver’s business leaders and elected officials to “peer” cities to learn how those cities are addressing the same urban planning issues facing Denver.
“We always started with our own vision, then went to see how other cities were making that vision real,” McCallum emphasizes. “My goal was always to shift the conversation from if we should do something (such as installing bike lanes) to how we should do something.”
Scaling Up
By spring 2023, however, McCallum was itching to “scale” her impact in the transportation industry. She wanted to do more than just serve Denver’s urban planning needs.
“OMF was that opportunity,” she declares. “I wanted to challenge myself to learn how MDS and CDS were creating a transportation ecosystem that could benefit cities worldwide.”
She joined OMF in October 2023 and has been there ever since.
How OMF Was Born
MDS was originally developed in 2018 by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). Dockless, shared-mobility devices such as e-scooters and bikes had arrived unannounced on LA-area streets. And the agency had no standardized way for service providers to report critical information such as trip starts/ends, vehicle locations and usage patterns to them.
LADOT scrambled to create an easy-to-use digital communication system that would allow city regulators and shared mobility operators to exchange operational data in a consistent format.
As more cities began exploring digital data tools, LADOT and other transportation agencies realized that MDS needed more collaboration and ongoing governance than a single city could provide.
In 2019, a consortium of cities, including Austin, Texas; Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, created the OMF, a nonprofit dedicated to developing open-source digital tools for managing urban infrastructure.
Governing the Digital Downtown
Today, OMF provides a forum for public agencies, private mobility operators, technical experts and transportation advocates to collaborate and shape the evolution of MDS and CDS. Its challenge is to maintain standards that can be used easily worldwide.
“At the Downtown Denver Partnership,” McCallum reflects, “we stewarded a public space that you could walk through, touch and breathe. With OMF, we’re stewarding a digital space. It, too, requires feedback from the public and the private sector.”
Reducing Friction for Cities
McCallum often compares OMF’s data standards to standardized dimensions used in appliance manufacturing.
“Dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines are built to common sizes so they fit in standard cabinets,” she says. “Kitchen designers don’t have to design a new kitchen around every new product. And consumers don’t have to remodel their kitchen or laundry room whenever they replace an appliance.”
Digital data standards, McCallum continues, work the same way.
“With MDS and CDS, cities and transportation companies can use the same data format and the same type of connection to share operational data about all types of mobility devices,” she says. “It effectively reduces ‘friction’ between cities and mobility operators.”
Growing the Digital Community
Today, OMF estimates that more than 200 mobility service providers operating in some 1,200 cities in dozens of countries have adopted MDS, while about a dozen public agencies and transportation companies are using or running pilot studies to adopt CDS. Sadly, only 67 government agencies (mostly cities) and 21 companies have formally joined OMF.
“Remember, MDS and CDS are free, open-source data standards,” McCallum notes. “You don’t have to be an OMF member to use them. But membership gives you a seat at the table to help shape them.”
Joining OMF is free for public agencies, she emphasizes (but they must return a signed membership form) while commercial members pay dues. Which is why she takes a disciplined, “turn by turn” approach to recruiting new members.
“I try to be very thoughtful about conversations I have with city officials and transportation companies,” McCallum says. “I do lots of research to understand the types of work they’re doing, then offer them an opportunity to tap into and even provide feedback to our community of (MDS and CDS) users. If I can help people help themselves, I think OMF’s membership goals will take care of themselves.”
Making Membership Count
To incentivize city transportation agencies and mobility operators to join OMF, advises McCallum, the organization recently launched the OMF Academy, a suite of classes and programs designed to train members to understand and deploy digital mobility tools.
“So far, the program has been extremely well received,” she claims. “We promoted it to our best OMF stakeholders, hoping that they would invite their peers who didn’t understand digital infrastructure, MDS and CDS ...and that’s exactly what’s happening.”
Cities that choose not to adopt digital data standards, she warns, can expect to be “inundated” by growing amounts of (disparate) data from transportation companies.
“If cities don’t empower themselves with a standard way to collect this data, they’ll be letting modern technology govern them instead of governing this modern technology,” she emphasizes.
Prioritizing Family
Workdays start early in the three-bedroom house in Denver’s Southmoor Park South neighborhood that McCallum shares with her husband, two kids and two mutts, Os and Gus. Both she and her husband work from home, an arrangement that allows them to get their work done and be present for the kids.
“In the morning, my kids [ages 11 and 14] come first—getting them up, fed, and out the door for their bus or carpool,” declares McCallum. After a quick coffee, she usually heads to a nearby gym “to get her sweat on” with a favorite group of fitness fanatics.
Making Home Work
By mid-morning, she’s “back at work.”
“We renovated our house while I was working for the Downtown Denver Partnership,” she explains. “Initially, we did it so my husband could have a home office. When COVID-19 hit, I also created a makeshift office at home. Now, I work about 10 feet away from him, which I love.”
Living with Intention
McCallum admits that she’s enjoying working remotely far more than she thought she would. But that doesn’t mean she never leaves home. She meets regularly with OMF colleagues—the nonprofit has only three full-time staff members—and representatives of government agencies and transportation companies in the greater Denver area.
“Being a remote worker makes me more strategic and more intentional about the time I spend with coworkers and my business contacts,” McCallum observes. “I want people to know that I’m a real person, not just a two-dimensional object on a screen.”
Refueling on Leadership
When she’s not traveling or thinking about mobility, McCallum enjoys curling up with a good book. She enjoys thrillers and mysteries, but particularly leans into medically-oriented apocalyptic fiction. And, true to her “turn-by-turn” mindset, she also seeks out books on leadership.
“I think about these books as ‘leadership aid-stations,’” she explains. “Sometimes I just need a cup of ‘leadership water’ to keep me going and keep me inspired.”
She’s also intentional about family vacations.
“We love to get up to the mountains, particularly Winter Park, Colo.,” McCallum reveals. “We ski and snowboard in the winter and hike and mountain bike in the summer. My husband and I also prioritize taking our kids to different parts of the U.S. to show them other ways that people live.”
Mobilizing a Shared Vision
When McCallum thinks about her potential impact on the global adoption of MDS and CDS, it’s less about conventional metrics such as dollars raised or new members acquired, and more about networks and systems.
“My personal measure of success,” she claims, “is ‘Am I building a really efficient system and network that makes the world better?’”
At OMF, McCallum’s goal is to help cities and the private sector recognize the opportunities these new data standards present, and encourage them to engage with the community that’s shaping the standards.
“The real change happens,” she insists, “when cities and companies are leading this effort, when the principles of OMF [MDS and CDS] become a shared vision for cities, organizations and people around the world.
“What I’m hoping is that instead of there being, say, 100 people around the world who deeply understand this type of work, I want there to be thousands of people who deeply understand this work, not because my colleagues or I told them, but because I told someone, and then they told 100 or more people, and so on. That’s what I want in this world!”
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If you found this story interesting, I invite you to explore other profiles I’ve written about innovative professionals making significant contributions to the modernization of US infrastructure. If you have suggestions for other people who deserve mention here, please send your ideas to brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com. Many thanks.