As the oxygen allows our body to move, public transport is the motor of New York. Most people in New York rely on public transport or rental services to move around the city. Inside public transportation methods, taxi transportation has a big role in the transportation network of the city. Therefore, an analysis of the taxi operation can show insights about the behaviour of the city. The initial study is centred on Taxi trends throughout the year and the day. Additionally, it will also be used information obtained to make a comparison with new transport providers like Uber and to visually see the impact of the recent Covid-Pandemic on life in big cities. We believe this data-set provides endless opportunities and that we have only scratched the surface with our studies. However, some our visualisations can be observed or interacted to show how fascinating the data-set is. Our Analysis is guided by a Consistent Visual Platform which we use to direct the path of interest of the User, providing multiple articles as well as summaries and annotations.

Analysis

Study of the Taxi Trip Dataset

Through-out this article we will be analysing trends in taxi usage in New York City. We will see how usage changes during the day-month-year, so get pen and paper ready as, believe me, you don’t want to get stuck in NYC traffic! The working day in New York starts at 8:24 on average, we can infer from the taxi hourly distribution that the city wakes up at around 7:00 and keeps busy through-out the day until around 21:00-22:00 when taxi demand starts to decrease.

Comparison Between Uber and Taxis

There has been debate about the different ride-hailing methods in New York, since Uber arrived to the city. One of the most critical topics regarded traffic congestion in the city. That concluded in a case study carried out by the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). Thanks to FiveThirtyEight and their request regarding the law of Freedom of Information, the Uber data used for the study became public. In doing this, they gave us the opportunity to compare NYC taxis with respect to Uber and highlight the underlying differences between these two similar but different transport methods.

Taxis during the Covid Pandemic

COVID-19 has been the greatest sanitary crisis of our era and the biggest source of scepticism towards public transport. While it is uncertain when the disease reached United States population for the first time, it was clear that it was already spreading in the very first weeks of March 2020. On March 1st, the first case of COVID-19 in New York City was confirmed. Two weeks later, on March 12th all gatherings of more than 500 people were shut down and from this day schools and workplaces followed.