On Sunday, Uber launched a site called “Movement”. The website, which is currently available by invitation only, will offer city planners, developers, and the public a partial view into the company’s ridership data. Users will get a glimpse into historical data like travel times, routes and episodic spikes around events.
In a blog post, Jordan Gilbertson, Product Manager and Andrew Salzberg, Head of Transportation Policy laid out what’s currently available through Movement and what will be –
This data is anonymized and aggregated into the same types of geographic zones that transportation planners use to evaluate which parts of cities need expanded infrastructure, like Census Tracts and Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs). In the weeks ahead, we’ll be inviting planning agencies and researchers to access our data and explore zone-to-zone travel times, and will soon make the website freely available to the public.
This is only the first step. City planners face a myriad of challenges, and we hope to help tackle more of them over time. We’re excited to partner with city officials, urban planners and research organizations to continue building features that today’s transportation planners need. While it’s early days for this product, we’re committed to serving cities from Manila to Melbourne to Washington, DC.
The post also includes a partnership call for interested city officials and researchers.
Uber’s decision to launch Movement, may relieve some of the pressure the company is facing from cities who want to see not only aggregate trip data, but also more granular information about where riders are being picked up and how the carpool feature is being used. Uber has been in a pretty public fight with the city of New York on this issue and had just had its first public hearing with city officials.
As CivSource previously reported, Boston was the first city to get trip information from Uber, through an earlier version of what is now called Movement shortly after city officials voted to recognize Uber as a legal ridesharing service.
Image Source: Creative Commons via Sentor Mark Warner’s Flickr Page; Image – Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
