NYC Taxi Visualization

Introduction

The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has overseen standard and for-hire taxis in the city of New York since its creation in 1971. These taxis have been used as a primary means of travel for many of the residents traveling in, out, or around the city.

The city of NYC is divided into a number of taxi zones. Each taxi zone represents a subsection of the city, usually a region within one of the boroughs. Taxi zones represent areas that may have their own rules regarding taxi operation and fare structure. They can also divide the city by geographic regions or environment development type.

Over the course of years, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission has aggregated millions of records of data about the taxis and the trips they make across the city. The data for Yellow Taxis has been aggregated since 2009, Green Taxis since mid-2013, and For Hire Vehicles since 2015. This information includes specifics such as passenger pickup and drop off times, start and destination locations of trips, costs and prices of the trips, and even tips and payment types.

We decided to take a look at this publicly available data and present a visualization that provides insight into how taxis are used and operate in NYC. Our goal with this visualization is to present the data in a way that helps taxi drivers and taxi passengers understand taxi trip times, costs for using taxis, and the importance of taxis in various areas around the city.

Instructions

To use the visualizations, select a month using the slider below, which will filter the displayed data by that month. Then, on any visualization, select a taxi zone by clicking on it. The data will adjust to show the appropriate values based on the selected zone. Hovering over a zone will show more detailed information. Zones that do not have relevant data to the current selection are shaded in gray.

Month Selector

Credits

This visualization was created by Daniel Beckwith & Aditya Nivarthi.

The project was created for a Data Visualization course at WPI, taught by Lane Harrison.

The raw data used in this visualization was gathered from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission.

Source

The source code for this visualization can be found here.