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.
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?<p>"Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."
From the FAQ:<p>> What are the licensing terms?<p>> Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license.<p>Now, that's pretty interesting.<p>I wonder if we'll have API level access in a way that we can build tools on this data.
This is cool.<p>NYC already releases this information for taxis. It might even include Uber rides since they all have TLC plates, though I'm not sure.<p><a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...</a>
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.
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.
Doesn't this run contra to another recent story about Uber being against giving cities this data?<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-doesn-t-want-to-give-nyc-or-anyone-more-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-does...</a>
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.<p>Good idea though, but not applicable everywhere
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.<p>I'm personally very excited to get access and love that it's free, but cannot understand it from a business perspective.
> We believe that breakthrough insights and ideas can come from anywhere. In the coming months, we’ll be making this data open to all.<p>I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.