Melbourne has suffered the biggest increase in traffic congestion of any major Australian city this year, according to a new travel time index that uses journey data from Uber.
The journey times of 14,000 Uber drivers in Melbourne have been analysed as part of a new measure of congestion in the nation's four biggest cities, in a first for the global ride-sharing company.
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Uber has shared the aggregated information about the travel patterns of its customers to a transport lobby group, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. The data has been used to produce an index, the IPA Transport Metric, to depict the level of congestion in major capital cities and on some common routes within those cities.
The initial report using the metric, released on Monday, compares average car travel times at non-peak hours with travel times at peak hours.
![LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 03: The Uber home page is displayed on an iPhone next to the company logo on a computer screen on August 3, 2016 in London, England. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)](http://web.archive.org./web/20161011001701im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/q/t/r/6/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1471541171460.png)
Uber has made its travel time data available to a third party for the first time.
The report shows that peak travel times worsened in Sydney and Melbourne between mid-2015 and mid-2016, remained about the same in Brisbane and improved slightly in Perth.
It reveals that the steepest decline in road network efficiency was in Melbourne; and nowhere was this congestion more keenly felt than on the Tullamarine Freeway.
An Uber passenger heading from the airport to the CBD in the morning peak could expect a 16-minute delay on average compared with off-peak travel, and a 29-minute delay heading from the CBD to the airport in the evening peak, the index found.
![Traffic build-up on the Tullamarine Freeway, north of the Western Ring Road.](/web/20161011001701im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/n/l/z/q/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry4xn.png/1475982686876.jpg)
Meanwhile, someone driving from the outer suburbs to work in the CBD could expect to lose 7½ minutes in the morning and 9½ minutes on average driving back home in the evening peak.
Brendan Lyon, chief executive of the IPA, said the worsening congestion found in Melbourne and Sydney could be seen as a sign of the relative strength of those cities' economies.
"It [the metric] is going to show the impact of the bypass surgery that is going on in Sydney and Melbourne and the fact the economies are booming in both cities," Mr Lyon said. "And so already we're seeing a different picture than in Perth, where travel times have improved, and Brisbane where they're static. In some ways that reflects the very slow economies in those places."
In Melbourne, the high number of major transport projects under way was inevitably creating traffic pain, he said.
"You've got these very large projects – level crossings, Tulla widening – all of these things that you have to do that have a short-term impact on the travel pattern of a city."
![Government infrastructure spending such as on level crossing replacement works has helped lift Victoria's economy.](http://web.archive.org./web/20161011001701im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/o/x/u/j/j/image.imgtype.articleLeadwide.620x349.png/1473281538608.png)
Increased traffic congestion caused by level crossing removal works could signal Victoria's economy is in good health. Photo: Paul Jeffers
It is hoped that in providing regular reports on traffic delay, the metric will be used by governments and road authorities such as VicRoads as a planning tool.
Uber said it could start to make more of its data – rich with the detail of 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," he said of the IPA research.