Uber knows a lot about how traffic works within a city, thanks to all the data it’s been gathering from its millions of drivers and riders. Now, the company says it wants to make this data available for free, first to city planners, and later to the general public to improve urban mobility.
The data, which Uber is calling Movement and will be available at movement.uber.com, allows anyone to search for travel times during specific periods of the day from one area to another within a city.
Uber says it was looking at all the data it gathered and began to realize that it could be used for public benefit, and assembled a product team to make this happen. The result of this effort was Movement, which aims to address problems city officials and urban planners encounter when they’re forced to make key, transformational infrastructure decisions without access to all of, or the proper information about actual conditions and causes.
Essentially, according to Uber, it’s hoping to make it easier for those with influence over a city’s transportation picture to make the right decision, and to be able to explain why, where and when the changes are happening with accurate data backing them up. It also wants to do this in a way that makes it easy for organizations to work with, so it’s releasing the data organized around traffic analysis zones within cities, which are agreed-upon geographic demarcations that help with existing urban planning and traffic management.
