UberEATS set for further expansion across US college campuses
Uber has announced plans to expand its UberEATS on demand food delivery service to a further 30+ major US college campuses by the end of this year. In a statement posted on its website on 21 August, Uber said the new campuses would range from “Penn State to LSU to Boise State”.
Globally, the UberEATS service reached the 100-city milestone in July, when two Brazilian cities – Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte – joined the network.
In other Uber news, the newly-appointed CEO Dara Khosrowshahi addressed staff for the first time at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco yesterday (30 August) and media sources have reported that the new Uber Movement service has now gone live.
Uber first announced its plans for Uber Movement back on 8 January. Essentially, the service gives users access to some of Uber’s demand and usage data. The hope is that urban planners can use the data to develop projects that ease traffic congestion, while members of the public (and fleet coordinators in transport and courier companies) can plan their journeys better.
In the January statement, Jordan Gilbertson, Product Manager, and Andrew Salzberg, Head of Transportation Policy, explained the rationale for Uber Movement: “Every hour of every day, people use Uber to get around the more than 450 cities we serve. From Sydney to Summit, we’ve been working hard to get to know these cities, with the goal of making them cleaner, more efficient and less crowded. Along the way, we’ve found that local leaders, urban planners, and civic communities are all working to crack their city’s commute and figure out how best to invest in new infrastructure.
“That’s why we’re introducing Movement: a website that uses Uber’s data to help urban planners make informed decisions about our cities.
“Uber trips occur all over cities, so by analyzing a lot of trips over time, we can reliably estimate how long it takes to get from one area to another. Since Uber is available 24/7, we can compare travel conditions across different times of day, days of the week, or months of the year—and how travel times are impacted by big events, road closures or other things happening in a city.”
