(Orlando, Fla.) – Uber today announced the public launch of Uber Movement in three Florida markets by making the product available in South Florida, Central Florida and the Tampa Bay area. This is a free publicwebsite that makes Uber’s network data available to help address specific challenges faced by city staff, urban planners and researchers, and civic community leaders with travel time in various transport corridors. Anyone can sign in to access travel time data from Manila, Sydney, D.C., Boston, Bogota, Johannesburg, Paris, London, and now Miami, Orlando, and Tampa with more cities to come in the coming months.
Uber Movement shows data from the billions of rides that riders have taken with Uber, aggregated into zones covering the standard boundaries used by urban planners, for example in the US Census Tracts andTraffic Analysis Zones (TAZs). Uber matches anonymized GPS trace pings from Uber trips to zones, selects the median ping for each zone a trip passes through, then measures the elapsed time between the medians of various zones to provide zone-to-zone travel time aggregates at an hourly level. This enables planners to more effectively evaluate where investments in transportation infrastructure should be made in their cities using real time data. The methodology is available here: Download our methodology whitepaper (pdf).
“Tracking regional trends gives us insight into how the transportation system is operating and what areas need improvement. It also gives us an indication of future needs,” said Gary Huttmann, AICP, MetroPlan Orlando’s Executive Director. “When private companies like Uber make this aggregated data of riders and drivers available, it assists in our understanding of travel patterns and helps us make better planning decisions.”
“For the first time in Florida, anyone will be able to compare past travel conditions across different times of the day, days of the week, or months of the year,” saidKasra Moshkani, Director, Head of South at Uber. “Our tool also allows people to see how journey times in different parts of the city are impacted by happenings like major events, road closures or infrastructure investments.”
Uber has partnered with cities and organizations around the world to design tools that enable data-driven decisions about transportation challenges such as congestion, prioritizing infrastructure investment, improving safety, and more. This information allows for informed decisions about how to adapt existing infrastructure and invest in future solutions to make cities more efficient. Uber Movement can play a role in helping cities grow in a way that works for everyone.
Examples in the Central Florida area include:
- Camping world to Disney Springs: Weekend average vs. PM Peak weekends
- Camping world to Universal City Walk: PM peak weekends vs. weekend daily average
- Camping world to Universal City walk: PM peak vs. AM peak on weekends
Jeff Atwater is an avid fisherman and boating enthusiast. He is particularly interested in the environment and how to keep the planet safe.