How has COVID impacted the rideshare model in Chigaco?
By. Rousol A
When we all went into lockdown back in March of 2019, many things changed and very quickly. Suddenly everything was a possible source of infection. One thing that became clear was that transportation was still critical. A city relies on its transportation networks, subways, buses, and most recently, ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft. Now as we approach the one-year mark since COVID first appeared, some companies are attempting to resume normalcy. I thought it would interesting to explore how transportation has changed in the city of Chicago, specifically how rideshare patterns have developed during Covid. We’ve seen many articles claiming that rideshare has suffered greatly and may never recover. I wanted to see if that was the case in Chicago.
To start off, I will generate a hypothesis based on what I have experienced since COVID started. My hypothesis will be that 2020 has in fact impacted the rideshare business negatively. In beginning to explore this hypothesis we first needed to decide on how the comparison would be done. For this study, we selected two months: March of 2019 and March of 2020. March of 2020 was the month where the first wave of COVID really appeared in the US and so it would reveal if and how rideshare was first impacted. Comparing to March 2019 allows us to have a base model to compare by. In exploring the data, I limited it to 100k data points to try and get a representative share. The relationship this mapping will explore will be rideshare pickups overlayed onto community areas (NTA’s).
March 2019
Looking into 2019 should give us a base understanding of the rideshare patterns for the city before the changing nature of the pandemic. Below we see a map that is plotting pickups based on the community areas. We see a high density in Central Chicago and fades as we move further away. The airport being the expectation, the far-right circle polygon. I then created a heatmap to see where the activity was in the city. Again we see activity towards the center and fading out as we further away from the city center.
file:///Users/Rousol%201%202/Desktop/Columbia/GSAPP/Fall%2020/Urban%20Informatics%20I/output/folium_df2.html
March 2020
Again we see right away that the most active areas (yellow areas) are in central Chicago, the South Loop, North Side, and South Side. I set the scale max at 3000 pickups and those areas are the highest density areas. this map is identical to March of 2019. The heatmap for this month revealed the same patterns.
file:///Users/Rousol%201%202/Desktop/Columbia/GSAPP/Fall%2020/Urban%20Informatics%20I/output/folium_df1.html
Conclusion
This exploration of the impact of covid on rideshare business in Chicago was based on two months, March of 2019 and 2020. 2019 was the base month and we compared to changes in March of 2020. After serval different mapping attempts, a choropleth map, and a heat map we could identify the patterns in the city.
After comparing March 2019 and 2020, we saw that the hypothesis was proven incorrect. Rideshare did not appear to be affected during COVID. It maintained the business density and demand but it may have been directed to other parts of the city.
