DC is one of four cities included in the new Uber data dump

D.C. is among the first cities worldwide to receive a bunch of data on road use and traffic patterns from ridesharing giant Uber, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

Via a brand new product called Uber Movement, the company is giving cities (and the general public, down the road) access to its vast trove of data on mobility. “Making our cities move more efficiently matters to us all,” the Uber Movement site declares. “That’s why we’re providing access to anonymized data from over 2 billion trips to help improve urban planning around the world.”

The first cities to be included are the Washington, D.C. metro area, Boston, Manila and Sydney, but Uber officials told reporters they’ll be adding more soon.

The D.C.-specific data is historical, and shows (using data from anonymous GPS) how the region’s 30,000 (or so) Uber drivers and their riders are traversing the city. For example, a case study on the Movement site dives into travel times during the May 16 Metro shutdown, and shows (as is probably unsurprising) increased road congestion that day. This proves, the Uber case study concludes, the “critical importance” of Metro in the city’s transportation network. Take that, Metro haters. As Post transportation reporter Faiz Siddiqui put it on Twitter:

It's proof of why ride-hailing is no replacement for mass transit: "When [#wmata] was shut down, travel times increased dramatically" https://t.co/SZhvFa6ivx

— Faiz Siddiqui (@faizsays) January 8, 2017

Historically, Uber has kept this kind of data very close to the vest. It is a competitive advantage over the likes of Lyft, etc., after all. Given the company’s sometimes-tenuous relationship with cities, the Post article describes the data release as a kind of olive branch to city transportation agencies.

According to the Movement site, Uber will be rolling out access to the data to the general public “in the coming months.”

Stay tuned, civic hackers — we’re looking forward to seeing some cool visualizations.