Uber begins ‘significant investment’ of collecting data on Metro Vancouver

Uber is banking on a future in B.C. by doing its research and upgrading its maps.

Beginning Thursday, the ride-hailing tech company will send 25 vehicles out to collect mapping imagery for its app in anticipation of the service’s eventual launch on Canada’s West Coast. The cars will not be doing pickups and drop-offs.

Data collected here is part of a Canada-wide mapping project that began last year.

Ramit Kar, Uber’s general manager for Western Canada, called the operation “a significant investment.”

The company has been improving its Canadian maps and given all three B.C. political parties said they were in favour of allowing Uber to operate in the province before the end of 2017, it only made sense to include Metro Vancouver in the project, he said.

“We’re hopeful they follow through on that,” Kar said.

When Uber first rolled out seven years ago, they were reliant on third-party data. Since they started running their own tracking vehicles — the Canadian project started with Edmonton last year — “the quality of the data has been so much better,” Kar said.

They do have partnerships with companies like Google, but “it’s not exactly optimized for our purposes,” Kar said.

Uber will determine which are the best routes between commonly visited spots, where the best pickup spots are, where the entrances to buildings are, things like that.

“It’s really to help both on the driver and on the rider side,” he added. “It gets rid of a whole layer of frustration.”