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?
[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.
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.
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.
"Movement makes all insights available under the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial license."
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...
> [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.
> 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.
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...
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?
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.
EDIT: I think in the video they showed census tracts, which is one of many geographic units they could choose from.
[1] https://www.boston.com/news/business/2016/06/16/bostons-uber...
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.
[1] https://support.google.com/waze/partners/answer/6372611?hl=e...
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/uber-does...
Good idea though, but not applicable everywhere
I'm personally very excited to get access and love that it's free, but cannot understand it from a business perspective.
This seems like a good move from the PR perspective.
I genuinely do not believe this. If they intended on making anonymized data open, they wouldn't have a marketing site up already.