If Taxi Trips were Fireflies: 1.3 Billion NYC Taxi Trips Plotted

The NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has publicly released a dataset of taxi trips from January 2009 — June 2016 with GPS coordinates for starting and endpoints. <a href="http://chriswhong.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Chris Whong</a> originally sent a FOIA request to the TLC, getting them to release the data, and has produced a famous visualization, <a href="http://chriswhong.github.io/nyctaxi/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life</a>. <a href="http://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Mark Litwintschik</a> benchmarked various relational database and big data technologies using this dataset given its moderate 400GB size. And notably, <a href="http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and-uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Todd W. Schneider</a> produced some really nice summaries of the dataset, some of which are similar to work I show here. I actually was not aware of Todd’s work on this topic until after this post was written, so although there is a fair bit of overlap, this post and the graphics in it are original. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/if-taxi-trips-were-fireflies-1-3-billion-nyc-taxi-trips-plotted-b34e89f96cfa">Click Here</a>