Urban mobility and data: who will control traffic in Brazilian cities

The traffic problem in Brazilian cities is not a lack of technology. São Paulo already has cameras at thousands of intersections. Rio operates an urban intelligence center with real-time dashboards. Belém, Fortaleza, Recife — all have invested in some version of an intelligent mobility system in the last ten years. The real problem is something else: the most valuable data about how people move around these cities does not belong to the cities. They belong to Waze, Google, Uber, 99, Moovit. And whoever controls the data controls mobility.

The map you use is not neutral

When a driver opens Waze to avoid a traffic jam, he is simultaneously consuming and producing data. The suggested route is generated from millions of aggregated trajectories — and his trajectory will feed the next suggestion for another user. This cycle is the core asset of any mobility platform: real-time, behaviorally validated data that becomes more accurate as more people use the service.

The practical result is structural information asymmetry. São Paulo city hall may have access to data from cameras and loop sensors on roads, but Waze has access to the routing behavior of around 35 million active users in Brazil. The difference is not technological — it is the scale of behavioral data, which only exists because people adopted the platform as an everyday tool.

Fragmentation as structure, not as accident

Urban mobility data in Brazil is fragmented not because of carelessness, but because each transport operator has incentives to keep their data within their own platform. Uber knows where passengers board and disembark, at what time, and how often. The São Paulo subway ticketing system knows which stations have pent-up demand at six in the morning. Municipal bus companies have GPS in their fleets. Parking operators have hourly occupancy data.

None of these data sets talk to each other in a systematic way — not because they are technically difficult to integrate, but because neither operator has an obvious incentive to share. Sharing data with city hall could mean more regulation. Sharing with competitors is out of the question. The result is that the most complete view of what happens in the city belongs to those who managed to build a sufficient network to observe multiple modes of transport — and this role, today, is occupied by Google Maps.

City halls’ response: data as public infrastructure

Some Brazilian city halls have started to treat mobility data as public infrastructure, in the same way they treat roads and sidewalks. The logic is that if the physical space is public, the data generated about how that space is used should also be, at least in part, public.

The City of São Paulo, for example, has required shared scooter and bicycle operators to provide travel data in a standardized format as a condition for operating in the city. The model followed is the MDS — Mobility Data Specification — originally developed in Los Angeles and adopted by more than fifty cities around the world. The central idea is simple: if you use public space to operate, you deliver data on how this use happens.

This movement is not technological — it is regulatory. And it faces resistance. The platforms argue that user data is the property of the company, not the city. That sharing real-time operational data creates security and privacy risks. That open standards harm innovation. These are arguments that exist in any dispute over data sovereignty, and that generally gain more time than they gain merit.

What changes for those who build mobility products in Brazil

For companies that develop products in the sector — routing applications, fleet management platforms, multimodal integration solutions — the fight for mobility data is both a restriction and an opportunity. The restriction is obvious: access to high-quality data depends on agreements with those who control it, and whoever controls it has no obligation to give up. The opportunity is less obvious, but real.

Cities that adopt open data standards create access surfaces that did not previously exist. A company that knows how to work with data from MDS, GTFS-Realtime or city halls' open data portals has access to information that slower competitors are still trying to obtain via bilateral agreements. Furthermore, companies that position themselves as partners with city halls in collecting and structuring data have an advantage in concession and bidding processes — which continue to be one of the main ways to scale mobility products in Brazil.

Competitive dynamics in the sector will be organized around who can combine proprietary data with public data in a way that no single player can replicate. This requires both technical integration capacity and political ability to build the right partnerships with the right operators.

The long term game

The question of who controls urban mobility data in Brazil will be resolved in the next five to ten years — not cleanly, but through an accumulation of regulatory decisions, contractual disputes and market consolidations. Cities that are able to establish data sharing standards as a precondition for operation will be better able to plan, negotiate with platforms and audit the impact of algorithmic routing decisions on the use of public space.