Uber Movement (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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...

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Certainly, this data can be identifiable.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

>>> cannot understand it from a business perspective

This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.

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.

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