Uber data used to create travel congestion index in Australia
Lobby group, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA), has developed an index to depict congestion levels in cities based on aggregated data from Uber about users' travel patterns. Comparing average travel times in peak and off-peak hours in major Australian cities, an initial report showed traffic in Sydney and Melbourne worsened from mid-2015 to mid-2016, remained the same in Brisbane and improved slightly in Perth. The data could be used to assess the success of transport projects, said CEO of IPA, Brendan Lyon while Andrew Salzberg suggested Uber would look for further opportunities to derive useable insight from its data within the bounds of privacy and commercial constraints.

"It begins to make your transport planning much more sophisticated because you know what the problems are, you know what the demand patterns really are because you can track them and see them, and you know where the delays are happening across the network," he said.