With the growing issues of transport congestion on South Africa’s roads, especially in Cape Town, Uber has launched Uber Movement in Cape Town. According to the INRIX 2018 Global Traffic Scorecard, motorists in Cape Town lost 162 hours in the last year to congestion. Mayoral Committee Member for Transport, Felicity Purchase said “a multi-pronged approach was required to address traffic congestion because new roads would not alleviate the problem on its own. It is well documented that certain parts of Cape Town’s road network are at or near capacity during the peak-hour periods. This is partly due to population growth over the past decade or so,”.
Uber Movement was first launched in Johannesburg and Tswane in August 2017 and continues to provide data and tools for cities to deeply understand and address urban transportation challenges. Speaking at the Southern African Transport Conference (SATC) in July 2019, Minister of Transport, Fikile Mbalula said “South Africa’s transport industry must prepare itself for the next 10 to 20 years. We need to recognize that technology is transforming the sector with speed and scale that are hard to comprehend,” he said. Mbalula added that the next wave of shared and connected mobility solutions will impact the manner in which we provide integrated and seamless public transport services for the public.
Data-driven transportation benefits the community members because it provides a more improved data-driven transportation policy that will effectively show where investments in transportation infrastructure should be made in the cities. Hence, Uber Movement shows travel times across zones in a city derived from data from the billions of rides that riders have taken with Uber covering the standard boundaries used by urban planners. The website is free and the privacy of both riders and driver-partners has been upheld by ensuring that the data is anonymous and aggregated and cannot be used to access any personally identifiable information or user behaviour.
With the support of Zindi, Uber hosted a one-day Machine Learning Hackathon at the Stellenbosch LaunchLab. The hackathon witnessed young data scientists in South Africa, coming together in teams to build machine learning models using SANRAL data from the traffic command centre and Uber movement data to solve traffic-related issues in the Western Cape.
The young scientists used factors such as weather conditions, structures of the roads, occurrence and frequency of accidents from the provided data to best solve their challenge. Siphesihle Yapi, a member of one of the winning hackathon teams added that “through these innovative solutions we are able to improve the townships in which we reside in to help them become smarter and ultimately enhance road safety.”
