Abstract
Smart-urbanism discourses frequently invoke the transformative potential of data to solve city problems, but data are neither neutral nor are they readily shared in the pursuit of common goals. Drawing upon a two-year study of large-scale digital platforms in US cities, this paper investigates conflicts over data sharing between city transportation departments and ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft. By maintaining data monopolies, platform companies obfuscate the detrimental impacts of their services (e.g., increased congestion and pollution, dangers to cyclists and pedestrians) and interfere with city transportation planners’ tasks of diagnosing city needs and providing services for the public good. Ride-hailing companies’ resistance to data sharing serves the strategic goals of prolonging monopoly status and slowing regulation for maximum capital extraction, but I argue that it also performs a more insidious function of entrenching platform practices and logics, making alternatives difficult to imagine or implement. Against this backdrop, I explore the notion of a “data commons” approach to transportation management.
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