Since at least 2017, the Active Transportation Alliance has advocated for making ride-hailing trip data public so that we can have a better sense of its impacts on the local transportation network and plan and legislate accordingly. The report of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Transportation and Mobility Task Force, released last month, made the same recommendation.

Today Emanuel, along with the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and the Department of Innovation and Technology, announced that Active Trans will get its wish, since the city is publishing anonymized data from ride-hailing apps for providers like Uber, Lyft, and Via, on its Open Data Portal. According to the city, this makes Chicago the first city in the nation to publish detailed ride-hailing data.

“Making comprehensive and secure data available to the public is a fundamental element of good governance and a pinnacle of this administration,” said Emanuel in a statement. “With this information, we will better understand our transportation landscape and be prepared to solve future mobility problems.”

The city says the publication of these data sets, which will be updated quarterly as the ride-hailing companies share data with the city, represents early progress towards the task force report’s recommendations, and moves Chicago towards data uniformity and transparency.

Included in the publication are three sets of ride-hailing data:

• Registered vehicles, including:
  • Make, Model, and Year
  • Month of last inspection
  • Total trips completed
• Registered drivers, including:
  • Driver start month
  • City of Residence
  • Total trips completed
• TNP trips, including:
  • Starting and ending location, collected by census tract
  • Starting and ending time rounded to nearest 15 minutes
  • Trip fare rounded to nearest $2.50 and tip rounded to nearest $1.00

The data is anonymized to protect the privacy of customers and drivers. Driver names are not included, trip times are rounded to the nearest 15 minutes, fares and tips are rounded to the nearest $2.50 and $1.00 respectively, and locations are aggregated by census tract. Additionally, further aggregation methods are undertaken to expand zones that had fewer than 3 trips in a given time period. A full explanation of the anonymization methods can be found here.

This information is published in a similar format to taxicab data, which the city says achieves the task force’s recommendation to develop uniform data sharing requirements. According to the city, the number of ride-hailing trips in lower-income community areas has doubled since 2015. “We encourage city partners, academic researchers, and curious residents to explore the data to better understand the impact of ride-hailing services in Chicago,” a city news release stated.

“The availability of [ride-hailing] data on the city’s Open Data Portal is vital to our ability to be innovative around the future of mobility,” said Brenna Berman, executive director of City Tech. “This data will inform our work to develop focused, collaborative, cross-sector pilots that further the recommendations made by the City’s Task Force.”

Ride-hailing companies are licensed through BACP’s Public Vehicles Division as Transportation Network Providers. At this time, there are only three licensed TNPs in Chicago: Uber, Lyft, and Via. As it stands, ride-hailing drivers must have their vehicles annually and undergo a uniform background check prior to starting work. Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot has said she will align licensing fees and background check requirements for ride-hailing drivers with the currently more stringent requirements for cabbies.

All right data geeks, now that this info is public, go out there and make us some cool, informative maps!