This is more than travel distance data, which Uber started offering freely in January. Last week the company jumped on board the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) project SharedStreets, a data-sharing project that aims to help cities understand curb traffic and how to plan around it. For now, it's volunteering information on Washington, DC's roads.

There are promising applications of SharedStreets' data -- not least of which is establishing standards for curbs, traffic speeds, transit data and formats making it easier to share information between individuals and agencies, wrote Wired. Better still, it's all in SharedStreets' hands, a supposedly non-partisan third party that won't favor either private companies or city agencies.

That may comfort the former to share their information with an intermediary, which can process and provide it to civic bodies, but SharedStreets isn't the only curb data game in town. Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs introduced its own platform Coord, which offered a free sample of its services to help individuals and businesses.