
Uber Movement - ndirish1842
https://movement.uber.com/cities
======
losvedir
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
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_iceman
Even in San Francisco I have forgo car in favor of Uber. Using Uber is far
cheaper and convenient than having a car.

~~~
justinc8687
The question is, when the VC money dries up and they can't subsidize the fares
any more, does this still apply?

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jakozaur
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.

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

~~~
jayajay
This. People who drive automobiles for a living should start investing in new
skills _now_.

~~~
pyrale
They aren't paid enough to invest, though.

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kosei
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."

~~~
cowsandmilk
> 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...](https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-
partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise)

~~~
username223
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.

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tedmiston
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.

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bonyt
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...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml)

~~~
WillEngler
Chicago also released their taxi trips dataset recently:
[http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-
data...](http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data-
released/)

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return0
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.

~~~
usmeteora
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?

~~~
return0
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.

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jamesrom
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.

~~~
peatmoss
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.

~~~
cowsandmilk
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...](https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber-
partnership-has-not-lived-up-to-promise)

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

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

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

~~~
dj-wonk
Provable privacy based on 'anonymized' published data sets that resists third-
party information and linkage is really hard -- arguably impossible in
general. When people claim 'anonymized' data, I tend to not be fully
convinced.

~~~
positr0n
I completely agree with you on the difficulty of truly anonymizing data.

I do wonder if there any holes in this idea though: What if they released the
data the number of cars per hour per segment of road (a segment meaning a
continuous piece of road between two intersections) rounded to the nearest
multiple of 10?

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

~~~
dj-wonk
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
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.

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

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nerdponx
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.

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bogomipz
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...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-doesn-t-want-
to-give-nyc-or-anyone-more-data)

~~~
fourthark
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.

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

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NicoJuicy
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
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.

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dx034
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.

~~~
gedrap
>>> cannot understand it from a business perspective

This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.

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

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edgyswingset
> 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
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.

~~~
edgyswingset
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.

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

