Peak-hour traffic in Sydney has worsened in the past year, according to a new index that uses travel information from Uber.
In a first for the global ride-sharing company, Uber has shared aggregated information about the travel patterns of users to a transport lobby group, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia.
The result of that sharing, the IPA Transport Metric, uses an index to depict the level of congestion in major capital cities and on some common routes within those cities.
And Uber says it could start to make more of its data, rich with thousands of trips made every day in Australian cities, available to policymakers and transport planners.
"It's something we are looking to do more of, but not something we've done a lot of in the past," said Uber's head of transportation policy and research, Andrew Salzberg.
"I think this is the first time we've shared this type of travel time data with a third party infrastructure focused group," Mr Salzberg said of the IPA research.
The initial report using the IPA Transport Metric, released on Monday, compares average car travel times at non-peak hours to travel times at peak hours. The report shows that peak travel times worsened in Sydney and Melbourne between mid-2015 and mid-2016, remained about the same in Brisbane, but improved slightly in Perth.
"That is probably reflective of the slowdown in the economy," Brendan Lyon, the chief executive of IPA, said of the Brisbane and Perth travel times.
Mr Lyon explained the Sydney result as partly reflecting the construction of major road and rail projects in the city. "When you are doing major surgery in the middle of a complex transport network, you are going to see impacts in terms of journey time reliability," he said.
The IPA metric also demonstrates average peak-hour delays in different parts of Sydney compared to non-peak periods.
For instance, on a trip from the central business district (CBD) to the airport in the morning, peak traffic was an average 11.2 minutes slower in the second three months of 2016 than free-flowing traffic.
On a trip from the CBD to Parramatta in the afternoon, peak traffic was an average 19.2 minutes slower than free-flowing traffic.
Mr Lyon said the information could be used to measure the success or otherwise of transport projects.
"It begins to make your transport planning much more sophisticated because you know what the problems are, you know what the demand patterns really are because you can track them and see them, and you know where the delays are happening across the network," he said.
"And you can go back and test," Mr Lyon said. "Will WestConnex do what it actually said?"
Uber's Mr Salzberg said the company was open to making more travel information available to transport agencies, subject to privacy considerations and its commercial position.
"What we are trying to do is find opportunities where we can derive really useful insights from data within those constraints," Mr Salzberg said.
"Down the road we are looking to do more of these partnerships with a wide variety of groups, including government actors," he said.
