Travel time data from 5000 Uber drivers has been collated for the very first time and shows road travel in Brisbane is dawdling even slower than before.
However Brisbane's traffic was worsening at a much slower rate than Sydney's and Melbourne's – which both have major inner-city road bypass projects - but at about the same rate as traffic in Perth, the national Uber data results show.
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Roadworks on Kingsford Smith Drive is restricting speed limits to 40km/h, causing gridlock and forcing drivers to use toll tunnels. 7 News Queensland
The travel time data from Brisbane's 5000 Uber drivers (March 2016 to July 2016) shows:
In-bound to the CBD in the morning peak
- 3.6 minutes extra around key inner city roads
- 5.6 minutes longer in journeys in the outer suburbs
- extra 90 seconds to get in from Brisbane Airport (all trips)
- extra 6.4 minutes to travel from Chermside to the CBD
Outbound from the CBD in the afternoon peak
- extra 4.7 minutes in inner-city road journeys
- extra 6.3 minutes in outer-city road journeys
- extra 3.8 minutes to get out to Brisbane Airport
- extra 8.7 minutes to get from the CBD to Chermside.
The Uber travel time data in four capital cities has been collated for the first time ever by industry group Infrastructure Partnerships Australia IPA in co-operation with Uber.
The new data, to be released on Monday, is called the IPA Transport Metric.
It uses an index to depict the level of congestion in major capital cities and on some common routes within those cities.
IPA and Uber plan to make the time travel data available from thousands of trips daily to Australia's policy makers 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.
Brendan Lyon, IPA's chief executive, said the organisation began talking to Uber early in 2016 when it realised the extent of the real time, trip data information the company was gathering.
"What's different about it is that it is 5000 individual vehicles in Brisbane rather than a couple of (travel time) measurements from devices on top of gantries across key regional motorways," Mr Lyon said.
"So it is a live traffic pattern of actual road use in what is happening to travel time," he said.
Mr Lyon said the Uber driver trip data was different to driver surveys or measurements from computerised rumble strips that cars drove over, or counters over motorways.
He said it was additional to "point to point" travel time data on individual big projects.
Mr Lyon said it collated information from thousands of trips during the day, averaged those trips out and then created an index to reflect the travel time changes in each capital city.
"So it is a live traffic pattern of actual use in what is happening to travel time," he said.
The IPA and Uber want the data to be used to broaden transport and traffic planning modelling in Australia.
"t begins to change the discussion and the focus away from 'traffic is bad, so we will announce a big project'," Mr Lyon told Fairfax Media.
"And will start to drive a focus on what are the improvements that we need to make in regulations, in road systems and in technologies - in all sorts of ways - to make improvements across the national road network."
Mr Salzberg said the company wanted to make the information it gathered available to transport planners
"Down the road we are looking to do more of these partnerships with a wide variety of groups, including government actors," he said.
Mr Lyon said while the Uber data showed Brisbane's travel times were "decaying' at a slower rate than booming Melbourne and Sydney, it reflected a pause in major infrastructure projects in Greater Brisbane.
"That is likely to reflect the challenging state economies and also the slow level of major project delivery in those two cities," he said.
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