Chicago Releases Ridesharing Data

[SIGSEGV]

Chicago recently announced the release of its ridesharing data, the first big city to do so. See e.g. https://chi.streetsblog.org/2019/04/...-hailing-data/

I grabbed the data from the data portal(https://data.cityofchicago.org/Trans...rips/m6dm-c72p), converted it to a format convenient to me (ROOT!) and started looking at it.

Here are a few plots to start. More to come! Let me know if there are any requests.

The data fields available are (many of these are reduced precision to help anonymize):

start time, end time, distance, duration, fare, tip, additional charge, total cost, start comm area, end comm area, approx start location, approx end location, # of pooled trips

Time of Day:


Distance:


Duration:


Distance vs. Duration:


Average speed (duration at least 60 seconds):


Tip amount:


Pickup location (if I add more bins, there are gaps due to the anonymization)


Origin and Destination Community Area:


In case you didn't know, Garfield Ridge is where Midway is, apparently.


Origin Community Area:

[SIGSEGV]

And here are dropoff community areas for each pickup community area (basically the projections of the O&D plot above):

https://www.scribd.com/document/4061...ommunity-Areas

[SFBruin]

Wow, this is super interesting. So it seems like the majority of trips are for Friday and Saturday night, and there is a minor bump in demand during evening commute.

On a separate note, I am surprised that the companies allowed their data to be owned by the city. Most companies would not do this.

[the urban politician]

Neat stuff for sure.

Nothing surprising here, although I’m surprised that there aren’t a lot more rideshare pickups from Hyde Park.

[Sun Belt]

Originally Posted by SFBruin

Wow, this is super interesting. So it seems like the majority of trips are for Friday and Saturday night, and there is a minor bump in demand during evening commute.

On a separate note, I am surprised that the companies allowed their data to be owned by the city. Most companies would not do this.

Cool stuff. In addition to your observation, it also looks like most trips are short in distance and duration. 5 miles or less taking 20 minutes or less.

[Chisouthside]

Thanks for the plots dude. Also btw, did you plot these in R?

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Chisouthside

Thanks for the plots dude. Also btw, did you plot these in R?

Let me know if there's anything in particular you're interested in... the dataset seems to be the last 2 months of 2018.

I used ROOT for plotting (https://root.cern.ch/) since that's what I know best. I should probably learn R at some point...

[SIGSEGV]

Here's a plot of trip distance distribution for each pickup community area. Each is scaled to have the same maximum density (but some community areas like Hegewisch don't have very many trips so it's a bit noisy). Most long trips originate either at O'Hare or Midway. For neighborhoods like Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Uptown or South Shore there's a clear "local" and "downtown" bimodality. It's amazing how many short trips people take...




Here is the number of trips / hour /destination starting at O'Hare over the time period:

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by SFBruin

Wow, this is super interesting. So it seems like the majority of trips are for Friday and Saturday night, and there is a minor bump in demand during evening commute.

Most companies would not do this.

I wonder if the fares are in buckets of $2.50 so that it's hard to get detailed pricing information from this. It's too bad it doesn't say which company each trip is for... would be interesting to see if there are areas of Chicago that have different ratios of Uber to Lyft users.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by SFBruin

Wow, this is super interesting. So it seems like the majority of trips are for Friday and Saturday night, and there is a minor bump in demand during evening commute.

On a separate note, I am surprised that the companies allowed their data to be owned by the city. Most companies would not do this.

I was an uber/lyft driver in Cincinnati 2014-2015, right when it started. This data in Chicago is pretty consistent with what I experienced in the 1,200+ trips I drove during my "career".


1. Trips were overwhelmingly yuppies to and from frivolous social outings
2. Some airport trips
3. lower-class people going to/from low-paying jobs during off-ours.


Unfortunately, #3 has been quite damaging to public transportation ridership - certainly more so than yuppies who never rode buses to begin with. Off-peak bus service has been knicked all across the country by low-wage workers choosing to pay $10-15 for a 10-15 minute rideshare cab rather than a bus commute that involves a time-consuming transfer.

Public transportation ridership across the U.S. has also been damaged by easy credit for automobiles and cheap gas, but those two in combination with the appearance of rideshare has caused precipitous drops in off-peak rides since the 2008-09 recession.

[Crawford]

I don't think this is ridesharing data. It appears to be for-hire (traditionally "taxi", now in most places Uber/Lyft) data.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I don't think this is ridesharing data. It appears to be for-hire (traditionally "taxi", now in most places Uber/Lyft) data.

You're right, I used the "sharing economy" euphemism for Uber/Lyft.... where people "share" their cars (for a fee).

Some fraction of these are pooled though, but the way the data is tabulated it's not so easy to figure out how much (basically it counts the total number of combined trips, so something like A, AB, B,BC,C,CD,D,DE counts as 5 trips even though at most two unique individuals (or pairs) are in the vehicle at once).

[SIGSEGV]

Here's another plot that came out of a discussion with someone today.


This is weekdays during the period, although I didn't bother filtering out holidays (which might be responsible for some of the low outliers in the morning).

The blue line takes about 40 minutes from O'Hare to the loop, although it is slightly (or much, if at the international terminal) farther from the terminals and the wait time might be higher on average (not sure, I don't ever take Uber/Lyft from the airport).

[Baronvonellis]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I was an uber/lyft driver in Cincinnati 2014-2015, right when it started. This data in Chicago is pretty consistent with what I experienced in the 1,200+ trips I drove during my "career".


1. Trips were overwhelmingly yuppies to and from frivolous social outings
2. Some airport trips
3. lower-class people going to/from low-paying jobs during off-ours.

Why is it mostly yuppies? Don't they have cars and can drive themselves?
I use it 95% of the time to go to the airport. If the brown line was ever extended to the blue line, I would probably take the train then.

That must be why I have had some mentally unstable uber drivers, who complained about the rich people they drive around the whole ride. I'm like dude, I just need to get home from the airport relax lol.

I had a former ex girlfriend that would take uber for everything, even going to work everyday for her job. I tried to explain to her that it would have been cheaper to get a car and drive or use public transit. But she didn't listen to logic, and said she wanted to be driven around everywhere like a celebrity lol! She was also a shopaholic and alcoholic, lived with her mother, and while she didn't make a great deal of money managed to spend every cent she had on frivolous things. I'm amazed at the people in Chicago that want to spend all their money on expensive brunch food and alcohol at bar and restaurants. For people that aren't rich it's alarming what percentage of their income people will spend on that stuff! I didn't date her long at least, she just wanted to drain my bank account.