Image: Uber.
Each time you take a ride with Uber, the service gathers data: the location and time of your pick-up and destination, how long your trip took, and so on. Each day that thousands of people in your city take a ride with Uber, larger patterns become visible: where is congestion happening, for instance. Uber does a better job at gathering this sort of social intelligence than any government entity, but city governments would love to have access. And soon, they will.
From Emily Badger at the Washington Post:
Uber is announcing plans to share its data more broadly with local governments in a gesture that’s both an act of good will and a bid for good press after a rough few months of criticism.
The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.
Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it’s primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.
“Uber offers cities an olive branch: your valuable trip data” [washington post]