Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance

1 comment to Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips, with a Vengeance

• TightDesigns

  June 17, 2016 at 1:52 pm Log in to Reply

  This post covers a lot and even then, I feel like it barely scratches the surface of the information available in the full dataset. There are endless analyses to be done, and more datasets that could be merged with the taxi data for further investigation.

  Lastly, the medium data revolution applies here. Not too long ago, the idea of downloading, processing, and analyzing 267 GB of raw data containing 1.1 billion rows on a commodity laptop would have been almost laughably naive. Today, not only is it possible on a MacBook Air, but there are increasingly more open-source software tools available to aid in the process. I’m partial to PostgreSQL and R, but those are implementation details: increasingly, the limiting factor of data analysis is not computational horsepower, but human curiosity and creativity.

  Ride sharing services like Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and others are networks of users and providers which each generate their own data. Compiling and analyzing the data would provide insightful information on how transportation in the modern age can be optimized.