Expanding the use of big data, cab aggregator Uber is offering the data it has collected through the millions of trips their cabs have undertaken in select cities to the local authorities to help them solve many traffic related issues. Called ‘Movement’, the current project is being implemented in 12 cities across 5 different countries; these are Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore Hyderabad, Amsterdam, Brisbane, Cairo, Melbourne, Nairobi, Perth, Pittsburgh, and Toronto.
The 4 Indian cities are among the 31 that Uber operates in the country and 600+ cities around the world.
Movement is basically a tool that will be made available free of cost and comprises anonymized data pertaining to the trips undertaken by Uber cabs from multitude of points to different destinations over a long period of a few years. This data could come useful to the traffic police, those engaged in research on urban congestion and pollution and practically any agency that wants to use it to find lasting solutions.
The insights one can draw from these data include how the traffic flow fluctuates during the week, hours during the day and also specific festival occasions, etc. Perhaps an effort of this nature and scale would never have been attempted before. Uber expects that by providing access to this data will help the local authorities make/alter their plans for urban infrastructure and those handling traffic in the cities deploy their own resources so that the larger objective of smoother urban mobility can be achieved.
This 12-city exercise is version 2 for Uber; earlier a 10-city exercise was launched which did not include any Indian city.
Three distinct outcomes of the earlier Movement exercise were the measurement of travel times from supermarkets in Cincinnati, impact of Washington DC’s metro rail maintenance disruption on commute pattern changes and local traffic and impact of the 3-month closure of London’s tower bridge on travel times.