Uber Will Provide Transit Data To Cities

mpicpp notes that transportation company Uber will be sharing the transit data it collects with city governments in order to "provide new insights to help manage urban growth, relieve traffic congestion, expand public transportation, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions." The company's first partnership will be with Boston, where Uber and other ridesharing services have been formally recognized by the state. Mayor Walsh said, "[D]ata is driving our conversations, our policy making and how we envision the future of our city. We are using data to change the way we deliver services and we welcome the opportunity to add to our resources. This will help us reach our transportation goals, improve the quality of our neighborhoods and allow us to think smarter, finding more innovative and creative solutions to some of our most pressing challenges."

Comments

I can't wait to "big data" this stuff...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

New York taxi details can be extracted from anonymised data, researchers say
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...

public feed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not publish the data wide open on the internet? (and if the government is interested, they can use it too)

Re:public feed?

[houghi]

Because they will use it as a trade off to become legal in cities around the world, where they are (often rightfully, at least in Europe) illegal.

Re:public feed?

[Half-pint HAL]

Exactly. It's a bribe. It's not hugely valuable data (the city could get almost as much useful data from taxi firms really) but because the city officials don't really understand magical mystical computers, it seem like some kind of golden egg.

Re:public feed?

[tlhIngan]

Exactly. It's a bribe. It's not hugely valuable data (the city could get almost as much useful data from taxi firms really) but because the city officials don't really understand magical mystical computers, it seem like some kind of golden egg.

Not to mention I don't think it's very valuable data. It's basically a self-selected survey of results, when a city really needs a general broad survey.

It's like cities that have apps where you could report problems along the road and other issues - they found that it was the richer areas that were getting the most service calls while the poorer ones were getting shafted - because the richer areas could afford the devices to run the apps.

So this would show you the travel habits of the well-to-do who can afford phones and know about services like Uber, while the old lady using the bus puts up with worse service because Uber's data shows they should optimize traffic elsewhere.

Cities need all information for transit and traffic information, not just selected information meant to make a few of their citizen's lives easier.

And what's with Uber claiming to be an app company? That's like Microsoft claiming to be a hardware company - while true, it's but just a small part of their business unless Uber the App company is a separated entity from Uber the transportation provider.

Re:This just in

[billstewart]

It's not ill-gotten data at all. Uber is a database service - you tell it where you are and where you want to go, and they charge you for the trip, and they know when your request was made, when you were picked up, and when you were dropped off.

All perfectly reasonable, by itself - it's what they do with the data that's sensitive, and how well they anonymize it before giving it to governments. Zip Code is a reasonable granularity for most purposes (assuming it's 5-digit ZIPs and not 9-digit); hope they'll anonymize the times as well (e.g. rounding to the nearest hour.)

Right on schedule!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Back when Uber announced that they were 'limiting' "God View" in order to improve customer privacy, I advanced the not-especially-insightful hypothesis that this was more or less entirely about looking less like a bunch of egregious assholes, and would be at best irrelevant, and at worst actively damaging, to customer privacy.

Sure looks to me like this is one of those exciting new uses that they've found for the data, and likely not the last one, nor the most unpleasant.

.. allow us to think smarter ...

[Another, completely]

Won't somebody stop these phrases before they hurt somebody? Think of the children!

Uber Will Transit Data To Cities

[nitehawk214]

I read the title as "Uber Will Transit Data To Cities"

Obviously they will be using station wagons for this service.