Uber Movement

https://movement.uber.com/cities

by ndirish1842 • 10 years ago

307 125 10 years ago

movement.uber.com

jakozaur• 10 years ago

My quess would be that Uber use it as a carrot for cities. Let Uber operate and we will give city official data and city planning tools for free.

thinkloop• 10 years ago

Possibly also better overall driving experiences are good for long term business. In the same neighborhood as Facebook working to increase access to internet world-wide, or Google Fiber forcing telcos to increase speeds and drop costs. Basically encourage others to improve the infrastructure on which you rely.

kirykl4• 10 years ago

A win win for everyone but the drivers. Sure they can quit but doesn't excuse Uber from using its negotiating power against exploiting them wherever possible.

zeroer• 10 years ago

Don't worry. Having drivers is not the long term plan anyways.

synicalx4• 10 years ago

I think there's enough readily available information on how Uber operates for want-to-be drivers to make an informed decision on whether or not they should 'work' for Uber.

fsaneq2• 10 years ago

Which is a problem why? Uber is not a charity.

pdog• 10 years ago

It's win–win–win. If cities make improvements to their transportation infrastructure based on this data, ultimately it helps Uber deliver better service to its customers.

djsumdog• 10 years ago

Well except for the drivers that get paid less and less now. I mean we'll forget about all that once their self-driving vehicles start being deployed, right? Well until they kill people.

I mean don't get me wrong, the data is valuable. But this is a company that constantly says "fuck you" to the law and fair work practices. Let's keep that in mind.

nnain• 10 years ago

This NYT article (titled, "Uber Extends an Olive Branch to Local Governments") is mostly about this sentiment - http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/technology/uber-movement-t...

edgyswingset2• 10 years ago

We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all.

I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.

obmelvin• 10 years ago

I don't understand why those have to be mutually exclusive. It's possible that they haven't finished cleaning the data for public use, but the data is ready for 'trusted' city planners.

edgyswingset2• 10 years ago

I don't think it's mutually exclusive - I simply don't trust Uber to act in good faith for anything they do. They've yet to demonstrate that they're deserving of trust that they're going to make that data open.

taneq• 10 years ago

Maybe they plan - for the right price - to make identifiable trip data available?

mklarmann• 10 years ago

And I do wonder why google maps with much more data hasn't done this...

jamesrom2• 10 years ago

Google's trip data is an ingredient in their secret sauce.

xfs• 10 years ago

1. Privacy 2. Google doesn't have the same incentive to release data to local governments as Uber does (to improve regulatory relationships).

daenney• 10 years ago

How so privacy? This data is anonymised, they could do the same.

kamyarg• 10 years ago

they do, via waze (https://www.waze.com/). Founded in israel, acquired by google in 2013.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Google makes driving time estimates in advance available to consumers through Google Maps. I use it all the time when planning events around rush hour.

vxNsr• 10 years ago

Because that data is viewed as proprietary and useful for ads. In fact it's the reason Apple ended up making their own maps! They didn't want to share that info with Google but it was the only way Google was gonna allow for turn by turn directions in the app.

kyrra• 10 years ago

As someone else said, Google shares something similar with cities via the Waze Connected Citizen Program[0][1]. Waze publishes a list of cities that participate here[2].

I think Google can't share the traffic data it shows users as it's probably an aggregation of multiple sources, and they probably don't have the rights give away that information. The Waze CCP is an opt-in service on Waze where people can share their information and input with cities.

[0] https://www.waze.com/ccp

[1] https://support.google.com/waze/partners/answer/6372611?hl=e...

[2] https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Connected_Citizens_Program

jamesrom2• 10 years ago

How does Uber anonymize the data? Does it only use subset of a trip? If you can see where and when a trip started or finished, it's definitely not anonymous enough.

cicero19• 10 years ago

Certainly, this data can be identifiable.

mortehu• 10 years ago

From the FAQ: "All data is anonymized and aggregated to ensure no personally identifiable information or user behavior can be surfaced through the Movement tool"

Aggregation is a common method for anonymization. One approach is to only display trips that were made by at least 15 different people in a day.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Maybe they could randomize the pickup / dropoff points within a small radius, say 1/4 mile.

notliketherest• 10 years ago

Yeah one scenario I was thinking of was the case of a rural home that's isolated from other buildings. It's plainly obvious that any data coming to and from that building is the occupants. There probably has to be some threshold of users (say, > 100 users taking a route) before it's exposed through this service.

peatmoss3• 10 years ago

Watch the video again--geographic aggregation. Summary stats from geo-to-geo.

EDIT: I think in the video they showed census tracts, which is one of many geographic units they could choose from.

cowsandmilk2• 10 years ago

In their trial with Boston, it was limited to zip codes[1]. Cross my finger for census tracts as that would be far more useful.

[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...

Paul-ish• 10 years ago

I'm curious what techniques they will use to anonymize the data. I would guess some sort of differential privacy technique.

dj-wonk2• 10 years ago

I hope so, but I would be a little surprised if they used DP. I am more inclined to think they will take a 'traditional' (weaker in terms of provable privacy protection) approach.

frankmcsherry• 10 years ago

It's totally reasonable to consider doing something like this with differential privacy. The techniques exist, but it would still be pretty brave of them. They are certainly aware of DP.

Example technique: if you treat each record as a (src,dst) pair of (lat,lon) pairs or somesuch, you can then build a 4d grid whose cells you populate with (Laplace) noisy counts. This provides eps-differential privacy when the noise is roughly 1/eps.

Whenever counts are sufficiently large, you can refine the contents of the cell and ask again. If you do the refinement at most k times, you get k*eps-differential privacy. There are smarter ways that work even better.

These provide "trip privacy", meaning they mask the presence/absence of individual trips. Uber presumably has user identifiers, and could group all trips by one user together, and do the same counting where the weight of each trip is scaled down so that they sum to at most one for each user. This would then give "user privacy", meaning it masks the presence/absence of individual users.

NicoJuicy• 10 years ago

This won't help in Belgium, where Trucks need to pay "road taxes" and have a device installed for that. They can also get the data for tracking vehicles and they won't need Uber.

Good idea though, but not applicable everywhere

dllthomas• 10 years ago

Knowing "N people wanted to go from roughly here to roughly there enough to pay Uber for the ride" is information that wouldn't show up in "my truck moved from X to Y" data, and which is potentially hugely valuable to those adjusting public transit.

kabes• 10 years ago

This is focused on urban traffic. That may be totally different from truck traffic, which avoids (or even isn't allowed in) urban areas.

politician• 10 years ago

Having read no further than the headline, I really wanted this article to be about on-demand piggyback rides.

bonyt• 10 years ago

This is cool.

NYC already releases this information for taxis. It might even include Uber rides since they all have TLC plates, though I'm not sure.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...

WillEngler2• 10 years ago

Chicago also released their taxi trips dataset recently: http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data...

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

From the FAQ:

What are the licensing terms?
Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license.

Now, that's pretty interesting.

I wonder if we'll have API level access in a way that we can build tools on this data.

kosei• 10 years ago

Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds. Many cities are starting to make this data publicly available, and the potential impact to urban planning, traffic reduction, parking and more is enormous. That said, what's Uber's commercial angle? Licensing fees?

"Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."

peatmoss3• 10 years ago

Making friends. Uber is quite aware that their reputation within cities hasn't been the best. Internally, there is a loose federation of people who genuinely want to improve cities, and people who recognize the business value in not continuing to piss cities off.

WillEngler2• 10 years ago

Yep. Conversely, it's interesting to see some urban planning folks warm up to ride sharing as a way to extend the reach of existing transit networks. But still a lot of hostility, to be sure.

cowsandmilk2• 10 years ago

Hope this is as fantastic as this sounds

The experience in Boston was that Uber anonymized the data too much for it to be useful[1]. I would be very skeptical of this as it seems to be a program publicly touted as useful, but the e-mails obtained via FOIA requests show it to not be. I'm not sure what the solution is since privacy should be a concern.

[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...

username223• 10 years ago

An unsurprising quote from the article:

[Boston chief information officer Jascha Franklin-Hodge] said the data has been useful to show the volume of Uber rides in Boston and users’ typical wait times, but it has not done much to aid in city planning.

In other words, that was just a PR offensive. Maybe this new iteration will be something else, but I would be skeptical.

sebleon• 10 years ago

This is awesome, really happy to see them release such valuable data!

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

Doesn't this run contra to another recent story about Uber being against giving cities this data?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-does...

bastawhiz• 10 years ago

In that case, NYC is asking for addresses and timestamps. The data provided by Movement is aggregate. In other words, cities like NYC want Movement but without the anonymization.

fourthark• 10 years ago

This is probably their reaction to the government requests for data. They want to define the terms under which they share data, and "volunteering" is the way to do that.

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

This makes sense. I bet if anything the the NYC issue may have just hastened the release of this.

return02• 10 years ago

Uber however caters to a specific class of people and they don't seem to be the people who can only afford public transport. This may not be an issue in America, but i think if cities change their public transit planning to accomodate the class of people who can afford uber, they will be disadvantaging those who really need it.

usmeteora2• 10 years ago

I don't know about that. Computers and Tvs and cellphones used to be only for rich elite businessmen, now, not everyone can afford to have one, but even lower middle class people can pick up a $200 chromebook, or finance a phone and the technology they have access to for the same or very similiar prices gets better every year.

There are actually very few things in life in which the quality and amount of it that can be afforded for the same price each year increase so much annually for someone with stagnant wages and little economic mobility, as hardware and software technology, and services that optimize their efficiency and prices based on it.

In general, the expanded use of something, especially with realistic competitors such as Lyft, results in the cost goes down and becomes more affordable over time.

Most new technology and services related to it are expensive in the beginning and become more affordable and common over time. Right now, a VR headset from Oculus Rift is expensive for most people and usually only tech geeks who work in the industry can afford the toys they make, but over time, everyone who has a tv will have it at an affordable price, and everyone will laugh at how expensive it use to be for such bad graphics compared to what they have access to in 40years.

If more Ubers, Lyft and other ride sharing organizations and companies are on the road but less cars overall because they solve traffic problems: a. competition for price goes up, cost goes down b. Traffic and therefore commute times and cost of fuel goes down, which also aids in driving price down.

This is the same thing for technology hardware manufactoring, if anything, Samsung is struggling not to go out of business in certain areas because the cost of a TV is so cheap now, and they actually make ridiculously expensive and luxurious tvs now to cater to the wealthy to help keep that sector afloat.

Cellphones now are in remote places in Africa, allowing farmers to develop their own trading systems via communication they never had before and an entire internal market for crop trading and development and business is now viable for people in third world countries because they have access to affordable phones now.

That would have never happened though if the first phone had to be affordable for everyone.

The first time someone does something, theres a lot of R&D time, waste inefficiency, testing cycles and messy feedback from customers through first iterations. The first time someone learns how to sew, they may waste lots of cloth trying to make a dress that is nice enough someone will pay for, and probably sell an ok dress for a price that does not exceed the amount of time and effort they put in, but it will still only be for rich women. It was very rare back in the late 1890's that someone could afford to buy premade clothing, and everyone had to learn how to sew their own clothes because it was too expensive. But its a good thing that very expensive market was sustained and not ousted just because only rich people could afford to buy a premade dress. Looking back, its clearly inefficient and a loss of time and money for everyone to have to be educated at that skill, the same way we will look back and find it particularly wasteful for anyone who spends the majority of their life in urban areas to have their own car and have to waste time navigating their own transportation, and if they need to venture out of the city for a day or the weekend, rental hubs will abound at the outskirts as they already do in NYC and other areas, for rental for an hour, 4hours or a day or more. This is kind of the cycle of development.

It's a good thing computers arent the size of small rooms or even small houses anymore or even that a small one cost an arm and a leg, we would all feel that to be ridiculous. in my mind, I think its ridiculous that families both rich and lower middle class are obligated to maintain 1-2 cars, usually two if both parents work, and then kids who get jobs before they move out and need to navigate themselves after school, have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars. If you are poor its even worse because you will have to buy a used car, and spend more time and money fixing your car when it breaks down, but in unpredictable spurts that costs anywhere from hundreds or thousands of dollars, making it even more chaotic for poor families to navigate through life.

As far as America's bus transportation in most cities. Give me a break. Barely anyone who is not on welfare uses my cities transportation, and its a 45minute ride minimum to get to the poorest area to the closest sector that offers them jobs. That's a lot of time each way minimum for a single working mother on welfare trying to get herself out of a bad situation, struggling between spending hours on a bus for a ten minute ride in a car for a better salary and affording rent.

I find usually liberal elite trying to make arguments for the lower working class and people struggling to get out of welfare usually end up shooting not themselves but the people they claim to be speaking for in the foot. Not surprisingly, in my area people on welfare are some of the largest and loudest demographics wanting Uber, because they lost all hope in their own public transportation system years ago. It's not just bad, its disgraceful, and when I find myself trying to schedule a cab (yes in my city you have to schedule and theres usually a 45minute wait minimum but thats rarely accurate) in person, which hopefully saves you bit more than calling, its crowded with people on welfare trying to get cabs with children in tow, and being robbed blind based on arbitrary taxi prices.

This may not be the case in the city, but actually rural poor and isolated economically struggling cities like Detroit and upstate NY who don't have subways can benefit greatly from Uber, much more so than the middle class.

Is there any product or service that has ever existed involving technology that was affordable for everyone the very first release of it?

return02• 10 years ago

That is irrelevant. Uber is not going to become so cheap that even the poorest person can afford it, neither are taxis some new and exciting discovery. Uber is not going to replace mass transit either, because the traffic problem will become impossible to solve. Therefore optimizing a city for uber does not mean it is optimized in general.

losvedir• 10 years ago

Very interesting. I worry about a selection bias, though. Uber riders are wealthier than average, so the trips won't necessarily reflect all the commutes of those in the city. I hope this doesn't lead to just an improvement in bus routes, road construction, traffic, etc. between nicer sections of the city.

dtnewman• 10 years ago

Not just wealthier [1], but also younger and more urban. People who have 25 mile commutes from the suburbs--even very wealthy suburbs--are more likely to own cars and less likely to use Uber.

[1] In cities with good public transit (e.g., Boston, NYC), uber can seem more like a luxury but in cities that are very car centric (e.g., Detroit, Miami), Uber is actually cheaper than owning a car for many people. I live in Miami and use UberPool all the time and I meet people from all walks of life. Car insurance here is very expensive, so for a lot of people, using Uber saves them money.

maverick_iceman2• 10 years ago

Even in San Francisco I have forgo car in favor of Uber. Using Uber is far cheaper and convenient than having a car.

prdonahue• 10 years ago

As a Boston native, I'm going to have to disagree with your assessment of their public transit as "good"!

peterwwillis• 10 years ago

Well of course there's selection bias, but it doesn't affect this use case because cities already concentrate all their transportation efforts on the wealthiest areas first. How it may affect things is that traffic may get redirected to new areas the way Waze caused suburban neighborhoods in LA to become flooded with speeding rush hour traffic.

yazaddaruvala2• 10 years ago

Traffic is traffic.

Yes only wealthy people's routes are being data mined. However, if someone is going from P to U, you will still learn that R to T is a hot spot. Those hot spots are common to everyone.

stardek• 10 years ago

Except the potential issue is that while R to T is the worst spot according to the data, there is a route in a poorer neighbourhood, C to F, that is far worse and more deserving of improvement than R to T. And it may be hard to know in practice whether this effect is happening or not.

gedrap2• 10 years ago

Well, you are right that uber users is not a representative sample of the city population. Biased data is not inherently bad, it's just that you need to be aware of biases.

Camillo• 10 years ago

I get the impression that much of America has the opposite problem. "The bus" is seen as something for the poor, which no self-respecting middle-class person would ride. The result is more cars on the road, more pollution, and less funding for public transit, since taxpayers are less willing to subsidize a system that's not for them. In places with good public transit, it is seen a something that directly benefits everyone, and not as a welfare program.

xyzzy123• 10 years ago

I went to LA and took the bus from the airport to the city (my default transit choice when there isn't a train). I had a pleasant ride but I was surprised to find that I was the only white person on a maybe half-full bus. I haven't encountered this kind of self-segregation on public transport anywhere else in the world before or since.

usmeteora2• 10 years ago

a bus in my city more than quadruples the time to get anywhere around or near my city. That means a 15minute car ride can take 1.5hours on a bus.

Most people who can afford a car will opt out of spending 3 hours a day on a bus, but for people who don't have any other option, they are burdened with this on top of working long minimum wage hours, and walking their groceries 1/2 mile home in the freezing cold with their children after a 10 hour shift, and judged for not being able to get themselves out of a bad situation.

Whatever the cost of an uber ride is, can be earned back multiple time in the amount of time people could work more, or allow them to come home and spend more time with their children instead of keeping them in after school public welfare programs which is shown to decrease crime over time.

In general, unless you are in Boston or NYC, the option of a bus is really the only option, and it is a disgraceful and absurd option for poor people working long hours at minimal pay. Ive ridden the public bus system in my city. It's a joke. I feel sad for people who have to navigate to work using it everyday, especially considering the majority of jobs that provide any hope of economic mobility are on "the other side of town" taxing their time even more to navigate further.

It is unreasonable to assume the working poor who are more statistically likely to have kids are not at an exponential disadvantage when a 15minute ride to work takes roughly 25% of their waking day, when maximizing hours worked is important with less pay, and kids are left in understaffed public daycare programs or unsupervised in areas with high crime rates at home. What do we expect?

nerdponx• 10 years ago

NYC has been asking for this, and Uber has been pushing back. It'll be interesting to see how this differs from what the city was asking for.

aceperry• 10 years ago

Amazing stuff. Looks like Uber is really making the most of their data. I hope this is a easily accessible and useful.

dx034• 10 years ago

You would think that with the amount of cash they burn through on a daily basis, they'd use data to make some money with it. I guess you could get a decent amount of money by cities by licensing it.

I'm personally very excited to get access and love that it's free, but cannot understand it from a business perspective.

gedrap2• 10 years ago

>> cannot understand it from a business perspective

This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.

Uber Movement

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