Uber joins with Infrastructure Partnerships Australia to show how cities move

In an Australian first, Uber has partnered with Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) to provide new insights on how our major cities move with the launch of the IPA Transport Metric.

Every hour of every day, riders take Uber trips to get around and enjoy Australia’s cities,  traversing freeways, major arterial roads, and suburban side streets. Taken together, these trips can tell us a lot about the way our cities move and how our travel patterns change through the day.

This kind of data is powerful, because it can measure real journey times, as experienced by locals right across the city, at scale.

Our aim with this initiative is to allow governments and the broader community to monitor the impact of planning and infrastructure decisions on real journey times in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.

We believe this can help governments better target infrastructure investment and build a greater understanding of how Australia is tracking in developing better cities with increased mobility for residents.

MELBOURNE TRAVEL TIME (MARCH-JUNE 2016)

“The IPA Transport Metric shows that the future is here and that we can already use available information to make better infrastructure and urban planning decisions.

Through the data provided by Uber, this new tool measures what we get out of the transport system, not just what we put in.

We invest tens of billions every year in transport, but until now ways of measuring actual performance over a whole city has been either prohibitively expensive or practically impossible.

This gives us a detailed picture of how the road network works within our four biggest cities, changing the discussion from a tally of new project needs to a better discussion about what’s needed to make the system work better.” – Infrastructure Partnerships Australia CEO Brendan Lyon

“We’re working to create more liveable cities by making it easier for more people to get around without having to get behind the wheel.

As ridesharing has grown across Australia during the past few years, we’re excited to see how sharing high level data and trends with governments can help show how cities move over time.

We trust the introduction of the IPA Transport Metric will provide some valuable insights for government and industry and contribute to the debate around important city-shaping infrastructure and planning decisions across the country.” – Uber General Manager ANZ, David Rohrsheim.

You can read the full report here.