Figure 7.
Strava Metro’s home page encourages cities to “Apply”.46 The Strava Metro program moved away from a paid subscription model in 2020 and is now, like Waze CCP / W4C, free for city transportation officials selected via an application process.
Data Sharing on Uber’s Terms At around the same time as the launch of Strava Metro and Waze CCP, the most prominent sharing economy urban platform, Uber, also began voluntarily sharing data with cities. In January of 2015, Uber announced it had negotiated a data sharing agreement with the City of Boston and would share “anonymous data about the duration, general locations, and times of rides that start or end in the city”.47 Although lauded by public officials at the time, this initiative again illustrates the limitations of the data philanthropy model for local governments. Boston’s then Chief Information Officer, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, would later admit that the highly summarized data shared by Uber only at the zip code level and only on a quarterly basis was “essentially useless” for the objectives the city had in mind. Tellingly, voluntary data sharing with Boston was announced just one week after Uber refused to furnish ridership data newly required by New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, suggesting a desire to retain control of data sharing by bolstering the data philanthropy model as an alternative to agency policy mandates.48
26
46
“Strava Metro Home,” accessed May 17, 2022, https://metro.strava.com/.
47
“In First, Uber to Share Ride Data with Boston - The Boston Globe,” accessed April 6, 2022, https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/01/13/uber-share-ridership-data-withboston/4Klo40KZREtQ7jkoaZjoNN/story.html.
48
“In First, Uber to Share Ride Data with Boston - The Boston Globe.”
Towards Urban Data Commons? On the Origins and Significance of Platform Data Sharing Mandates
