In a move to smooth over tensions from city demands to provide more information about their riders, Uber has decided to start the new website Uber Movement. On this site, Uber is going to make its urban traffic and mobility data from millions of drivers and riders freely available to the public. The data will show anonymized travel times between points in cities and be a resource to city planners and officials as well as the general public.
First things first though, Uber is inviting planning agencies and researchers to have first dibs on the information, then it will make the website free to the public. Washington D.C., Manila, Philippines and Sydney, Australia will be the first trial cities to have access to this. Uber has already been beta testing the program in Washington D.C. and the data will initially be available for a limited number of cities that will be added to over time. Currently, Uber is active in 450 cities across the globe.
All this is following a recent transportation conference in Washington D.C. on Sunday in a move that is likely a bid to gain goodwill with cities that Uber has often had to fight over regulations, laws, and attacks from competition.
An example of this can be seen in the city of New York by New York’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. It is planning to have a public hearing on Thursday, January 12th demanding that Uber release information to the city about where and when drivers drop off passengers, as taxi drivers are required to do.
What does this mean for privacy? Will people be able to track my trips and follow me?
To protect the privacy of Uber drivers and passengers, only the areas with relatively high trip volumes will be included (picture the area you usually see in your surge map). Realistically, it could be possible to track the movement of a unique individual if only a few Uber trips went through a specific area in a given time. To combat this, Uber will gray out areas where trip numbers are too low to protect driver privacy.
Uber Movement says it won’t map individual rides just segments of rides, focusing on travel time between specific points. Almost similar to the way the surge map works now. According to an Uber Movement statement, “We’re using ride data as a proxy and taking periodic GPS trace pings during the rides”
An example of this can be seen in Washington D.C. during the “Metro Nightmare Chronicles”, the Uber data showed changes in travel times when parts of the regional Metro were shut down for repairs. The Uber Movement data makes it possible to reliably estimate how long it takes to get from one area of a city to another and the benefit of accurately analyzing multiple trips over time. So Uber Movement = D*T/A…. I guess.
Don’t just think that Uber is just doing this because it’s great for business though, the Uber data gives cities a low-cost way to do high-res travel time analysis. This kind of traffic data that is usually needed by city planners tends to be either very expensive or out-of-date. So in a way, UBER IS HELPING LOWER TAXES?!?
“For us in the planning context, it’s very interesting,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Boston’s chief information officer. “Oftentimes, cities and state transportation systems use things like toll transponders to show how long it takes to get from one place to another. But those are on fixed routes. What’s interesting is this allows us to look at a lot of different routes,” he said.
Jascha adds that, “While the data isn’t comprehensive enough to allow city planners to rely SOLEY on it, it will be helpful. It also should be a boost to public engagement with planners…. this gives people tools to ask us questions. That’s really powerful. We believe in having an informed public and having conversations that are rooted in facts, so the more of facts that are available, the better.”
What do you think about Uber Movement? Are you an Uber user now? How will this help you?