Where do people go in NYC? 5 facts and observations of 2018
When I was told that, somewhere in this world, a lot of data regarding the taxi rides in NYC was ready to be explored, I paid rather little attention to it. Until about two or three weeks ago….
This article has a twin, that relates how I actually built the visualizations showed and explained here!
The dataset I took a look at is available on the TLC Trip Record Data page (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/tlc/about/tlc-trip-record-data.page).
This article aims at presenting what conclusions I came up to while swimming (almost literally) in a tiny portion of the data available — the year 2018 for the yellow taxis. That is, just saying, about 99 million rides to look at :)
Before you go through the results, here are the questions I tried to answer:
- Can we see trends in the flow of passengers in 2018?
- Is there a difference on holidays, hottest or coldest day of the year?
- Is there a difference between weekdays and weekends?
- Depending on the zone we look at, where are people most likely to come from? To go to? Is it different between weekdays and weekends?
So here we go, 5 facts about how people move in NYC (in 2018…)(in yellow taxis…)(with aggregated value per day, week or year!).
Fact 1 — Manhattan is the beating heart
Let’s take a quick look at what the flow of passengers looks like over the whole year.
It looks like Manhattan is the beating heart of New York, where most people are either coming from or going to. So let’s get closer to see what is really happening there.
We can clearly spot three main trends :
- Upper East Side
- Upper West Side
- Midtown and Lower Manhattan
Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
1. Upper East Side (North and South) : known to be one of the most affluent neighborhoods in NYC!
We can see that most of the traffic is either between the two zones (green circles), or intra zone (purple circles — passengers going from one place to another inside a single zone).
Let’s look at where people come from :
Clearly, we notice the exact same patterns for the two zones, with, in order of importance, people mostly coming from:
- Inside Manhattan
- The JFK airport
- Queens — LaGuardia Airport, Astoria, Woodside and Sunnyside
- Brooklyn — Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill
Now let’s see where they go to:
There is clearly a difference on where people go when leaving these two neighborhoods, but basically, we can summarize it with two observations:
- the radius of mouvement of the passengers seems to be the same for the two zones — it is very clear on the gif, the upper zone reaching more northern zones, while the lower zone reaches more southern neighborhoods
- Manhattan, JFK airport, Newark Airport and Western Queens are consistently reached from both zones
2. Upper West Side (North and South) : “affluent, primarily residential area with many of its residents working in commercial areas of Midtown and Lower Manhattan” (Wikipedia).
Far less obvious than with the east side, we can still see that passengers coming to and going from those two neighborhoods come or go from one of them (i.e from north to south, or south to north, or north to north, or south to south).
Let’s observe in more details where people come from :
We reach very similar conclusions than with the East Side, passengers mostly come from:
- inside Manhattan
- JFK airport
- LaGuardia Airport
And let’s see where they go to:
Same observation regarding the radius and the destinations : mostly intra-Manhattan, and the same three airports.
Note that we do not observe the trend suggested on Wikipedia regarding residents working in Midtown and Lower Manhattan on the video — which probably suggests that residents do not use the yellow taxis to go to work (it rather makes sense by the way….).
3. Midtown and Lower Manhattan
Much smaller number of people travelling daily, and dispersion of the destinations is more obvious to spot.
In particular, we observe the following patterns:
- passengers reach out to almost the whole city
- passengers come from Manhattan, and the two airports JFK and LaGuardia
So some of the conclusions we can get from this is that:
- people going to Manhattan usually come from inside Manhattan, JFK and LaGuardia airports
- people traveling from Manhattan usually go to Manhattan, one of the three airports (JFK airport, Newark Airport and LaGuardia), or close by Brooklyn and Queens
- people tend to take the taxi in Manhattan for short rides within Manhattan
- although e-hail is getting more and more popular, people probably still ‘old-style’ hail a yellow taxi when they need it in Manhattan
- we can also assume that non-residents tend to take the taxi more often
- could we conclude that this area being richer, people prefer to travel by taxi?
Note that this analysis is conducted solely on the data from the yellow taxis, that happen to be the only taxis permitted to respond to a street hail from passengers in Manhattan.
Fact 2 — There are four other hot spots, airports in first position
From the first observations we made looking a Manhattan, we spotted three other important centers reached out by the yellow taxis:
- JFK Airport
- LaGuardia and Newark airports
- Manhattan close by Brooklyn : Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill
- Manhattan close by Queens : Woodside and Sunnyside
Let’s look at where people at incoming and outgoing average flows for these neighborhoods.
Yellow taxis reach out to the whole city quite equivalently coming from JFK! But when it comes to going there, they pick up passengers mostly in Manhattan, Manhattan close by Brooklyn and a bit on the way in Queens.
Similar observation, although it is more obvious that drop off neighborhoods from LaGuardia are mostly in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and less to Staten Island.
Regarding pickups, let’s notice that for these two airports the other airport is a priviledged pick up neighborhood (airport transfer by yellow taxi?).
The patterns are rather similar to those observed with Manhattan and the airport: passengers come from nearby neighborhoods and tend to reach out to further out in the city, within a certain radius.
This radius seems to be of about 5–6km. The two airports JFK and La Guardia are some of the main areas passengers are dropped off at.
Fact 3 — Weekdays are busy, weekends are lazy…..
These first observations we made were based on an average number of passengers across the whole year. But can we spot some difference if we look at weekdays and weekends? Can we highlight more precisely some patterns?
Let’s look at the week of Jan, 8th (from 00:14 to 00:28):
Looking at a single week example, we can clearly see that the activity around Upper East Side is mostly during weekdays, less animation during weekends! What about during the week of Mar, 11th (from 2:18 to 2:34)?
We confirm this by looking at another random week.
Can we maybe look at the difference between weekdays and weekends and where people come from and go to?
We confirm that most traffic we noticed to be important ealier, connecting Manhattan to Manhattan and close by neighborhoods, actually happen during the week!
Besides, it looks like people actually come from further, and go further on weekends (blue areas on the maps).
From this we can conclude two things:
- yellow taxi passengers could very well be mostly workers — commute within Manhattan and airports during the week
- on weekends, people taking yellow taxis reach out to further neighborhoods
Fact 4 — …and holidays are lazy as well!
What about specific holidays? Let’s look at some of them. Here is a slow motion compilation of some of the dates we talk about in this fact and the next one.
01/01 — New Year
Rather calm day! We could assume that people were probably either resting or spending time away (with their family, traveling, …) so not going around NYC.
02/14 — Valentine’s Day
Wednesday, it looks like a regular weekday with traffic where we spotted it earlier.
07/04 — National Day
It is probably one of the few Wednesdays of the year to have so little traffic in Manhattan in comparison to the ‘normal’ working Wednesdays!
10/31 — Halloween
Noticeable amount of people going from Upper East Side South to Upper East Side North, coincidence?
Let’s note that this observation is valid for the 30th of October and the 1st of November as well.
11/22 — Thanksgiving
Again, rather calm day for a weekday! Family time, people were not wandering around by taxi.
12/25 — Christmas
Same conclusion, calmer day.
Besides, let’s see if the patterns are different on the coldest and hottest days of the year?
01/07 — the coldest day of the year in NYC
It was a Sunday, and as we saw, less concentration at the main centers highlighted ealier. There is no obvious pattern to see here.
07/01 — the hottest day of the year in NYC
Likewise, it was a Sunday, and as we saw, less concentration at the main centers highlighted ealier. I would have expected to see maybe the traffic towards Central Park higher, because this is what we could usually observe in Paris (did I forget to mention I am French?, on hot days people go to the closest park. But then I remembered that unlike Parisians, New Yorkers most probably have air conditioning at home :)
So at this point, my conclusion is that on bank holidays people take less the taxi! Which could be counter-intuitive if we see the taxi as a simple mean of transportation — I would expect people to go somewhere they are not used to on holidays. But maybe at this point we could conclude (again) that passengers of the yellow taxis are mostly workers, using the taxi during working weekdays?
In this case, the weather or any other event does not have a noticeable impact on where people go to by taxi.
Fact 5 — Christmas and the blizzard could change the deal
Remember from the previous video Dec, 14th (busiest day) and Jan, 4th (least busy day)?
12/14 (> 11k passengers)
Can we guess this has anything to do with buying gifts for upcoming Christmas?
01/04 (about 7000 passengers)
This very unbusy day looks a lot alike the bank holidays we saw earlier — and it is a Thursday ! I am not sure how to interpret this. It happens to be my birthday, but I was not aware they made it a bank holiday in the USA? :)
Joke aside, it looks like actually the weather can play a big role on the flow of passengers: a blizzard kept them all home!
https://www.weather.gov/okx/Blizzard_Jan42018
Fun fact — what can Marvel superheroes learn from this?
Well… you know…. I really had to check :)
Although I seriously doubt the bad guys would take the taxi to escape from a super hero, just in case they do, here is an insight on where they would most probably come from and go to (difference between weekdays and weekends).
Now you know where to look for them if you see them hail a yellow taxi!
Daredevil — Hell’s Kitchen
Luke Cage — Harlem
Spider Man — Forest Hills
Captain America — Brooklyn Heights
Iron Man — Manhattan Park Avenue
Busiest area of NYC, will not be easy!
Conclusion
We looked at this problem from a few angles and using a few different visualizations, it is now time to actually answer the questions we started with! Let’s see if we can answer them simply:
- Can we see trends in the flow of passengers in 2018?
Yes! There are some main pick up and drop off centers, among them Manhattan, the airports, and Manhattan nearby Brooklyn and Queens.
We observed that passengers usually come to these neighborhoods from a nearby neighborhood (radius of about 3–4km), and tend to reach out to neighborhood within a 5–6km distance in most cases.
- Is there a difference on holidays, hottest or coldest day of the year?
Yes! It seems like on bank holidays people take less the taxi, and that points out that probably yellow taxi passengers are mostly workers, using the taxi during working days.
Regarding the impact off the weather, it was not evident, to the exception of the 4th of January, blizzard day that saw very little traffic.
- Is there a difference between weekdays and weekends?
Yes! Weekdays appear to be much busier than weekends! This reinforces the idea that yellow taxi passengers are mostly workers.
Besides, it looks like people actually come from further, and go further on weekends than the usual radius we mentioned in the first question.
- Depending on the zone we look at, where are people most likely to come from? To go to? Is it different between weekdays and weekends?
We highlighted that some neighborhoods are strongly connected:
- Manhattan, and in particular Upper East Side North and South
- JFK and La Guardia airport with Manhattan for incoming traffic and the whole city for outgoing traffic
- Manhattan close by neighborhood in Queens and Brooklyn
These connections are more evident during the week with a higher number of passengers using the yellow taxis.
And you, where do you go in NYC?
If you wish to take a closer look at the visualizations I used for this blog, you can find them here:
- All the chloropleth maps: https://wintermute.digital/NYC_taxi_rides/
- Whole year videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzyYVatyjV6skOg8Y31Js02STjQ52pjwE
- Weekdays aggregation : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzyYVatyjV6ugbJKhs0jxBbHObngzhh-m
- Weekends aggregation: (to be added!)
Besides, all the source code is available on my GitHub profile, and the twin article is available here.
