Uber, the car-ride app that has tangled with cities worldwide over its effect on taxi industry and frequent refusal to follow rules, is now reaching out to cities with what might be a peace offering.
The company’s thousands of cars, all hooked up to GPS and software that keeps their location and speed monitored, generate masses of data on traffic patterns, bottlenecks and speeds. Uber has now offered to share that info—free of cost—with government traffic agencies to help them with planning and traffic control.
Other ‘live’ traffic data is generated by other services, but usually not for free. The Uber initiative, called Movement, will launch in February as a website. It will be accessible to anyone, but mainly useful to city planners. The first cities to go on-line will be Washington, Sydney and Manila, with others to follow over time.
But lest you think that Uber’s entirely given up its rogue ways: Last month the company began running a fleet of self-driving cars in San Francisco, without getting the licenses needed to operate them, even with a driver on board in case of need. Rather than comply, Uber’s simply moved the test to Arizona.
