Uber Movement Data: A Proxy for Average One-way Commuting Times by Car

Recently, Uber released datasets named Uber Movement to the public in support of urban planning and transportation planning. To prevent user privacy issues, Uber aggregates car GPS traces into small areas. After aggregating car GPS traces into small areas, Uber releases free data products that indicate the average travel times of Uber cars between two small areas. The average travel times of Uber cars in the morning peak time periods on weekdays could be used as a proxy for average one-way car-based commuting times. In this study, to demonstrate usefulness of Uber Movement data, we use Uber Movement data as a proxy for commuting time data by which commuters’ average one-way commuting time across Greater Boston can be figured out. We propose a new approach to estimate the average car-based commuting times through combining commuting times from Uber Movement data and commuting flows from travel survey data. To further demonstrate the applicability of the commuting times estimated by Uber movement data, this study further measures the spatial accessibility of jobs by car by aggregating place-to-place commuting times to census tracts. The empirical results further uncover that 1) commuters’ average one-way commuting time is around 20 min across Greater Boston; 2) more than 75% of car-based commuters are likely to have a one-way commuting time of less than 30 min; 3) less than 1% of car-based commuters are likely to have a one-way commuting time of more than 60 min; and 4) the areas suffering a lower level of spatial accessibility of jobs by car are likely to be evenly distributed across Greater Boston.