Analysis of 100M Taxi Trips in Chicago Shows Usage Declining 35% per Year

Bad for taxi drivers, good for tourism.<p>I&#x27;ve done business in both Tokyo and Hong Kong. Historically, a taxi in Tokyo has been ~3x that of the same distance in Hong Kong. When considering where to Holiday, that significant additional expense is a consideration.<p>I&#x27;d also be interested, if there is enough sensitivity in the data, to see a correlation between taxi cost and DUIs.

Chicago taxis are roughly double the cost of an Uber&#x2F;Lyft w&#x2F;o surge pricing IF you&#x27;re not crossing the city boundary. In my experience, the only time a taxi end up cheaper is if you need a flat rate to the airport during a time when waiting in traffic would get you destroyed by Uber.

Pardon my ignorance, but is there something in the cabbie&#x27;s contract that restricts her from also being a driver for Uber&#x2F;Lyft? I assume so; in Japan, this is not the case, because every time I hailed an Uber, at traditional cab driver appeared.

Chicago is the canonical example of a city with _awful_ taxi service getting hammered by a better product.

Funny, I just started doing similar work with the data a few days ago. It&#x27;s definitely an interesting dataset that&#x27;s been fun to play with.<p>From the privacy side of things, and to prove a point, I&#x27;ve been working on de-anonmyizing the data for the past few days by comparing the data against a few other datasets from FOIA and data.cityofchicago.org. It&#x27;s so far been surprisingly easy to find the plate and driver info. The sort of myopic privacy with these large datasets is pretty shocking. (I don&#x27;t plan on making the code&#x2F;results public except to maybe Chicago&#x27;s own data folk.)

So, given that the stated goals of ride-sharing startups are to automate their workforce (with Uber basically saying &quot;automation or bust&quot;), I think there&#x27;s a need to build economic analysis of what this means.<p>In theory, you could correlate data between <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;movement.uber.com&#x2F;cities" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;movement.uber.com&#x2F;cities</a> and this analysis and start building a picture of what it means when a model with less variable costs starts impacting the market.

Is encouragement of cycling and&#x2F;or use of public transport also a factor in this?

Purely from taking the data from this article, I see it next to impossible that ride sharing has anything to do with this when you look at the comparison with New York.<p>It seems to me that there was an upward spike in 2015 and now it&#x27;s declines back to pre-2013 levels.<p>But there are also unknown factors at play here... - what has the economy been like in the last 5 years for the suburbs? - what are the tourism levels over time - the u.s has had a slight economic growth in the last 5 years; what are the car sales in the same areas? Rising?<p>It seems more like Chicago had a number of downtown events or draw over the course of 1 year, and has now declined. However, the article is basically using the highest spike as the baseline.

One thing I hate about Taxis is the meter. I want a flat price before they get in, but in many countries they kick up a huge fuss or refuse to take you.

form my experience, taxis in Chicago are ~1.5x more expensive vs uber.<p>in nyc its the opposite, ubers are ~1.5x more expensive.<p>could partially explain the difference in decline.