2016-03-wapo-uber

#"Uber seems to offer better service in areas with more white people. That raises some tough questions" By Jennifer A Stark and Nick Diakopoulos

This is a repository meant to support transparency and reproducibility of the data analysis and visualization presented in the Washington Post article "Uber seems to offer better service in areas with more white people. That raises some tough questions"

If you have cloned this repo and downloaded the raw Uber data, you can reproduce the analysis in this notebook.

The Data

Collecting data with the Uber API

Data were collected using the Uber API with config.config and gatherUberData.py - based on scripts of the same name from our uberpy project.

config.config was modified to collect data every 3 minutes, provided a list of 276 locations across DC, and provided a list of Uber API keys.

gatherUberData.py was modified to save data with the DC local datetime.

###Sampling the Data The method for determining the 276 locations in DC to sample used the following steps:

• A 22 x 22 grid of longitudes and latitudes was applied across DC
• Addresses were then associated with each point using Nominatim from geopy.geocoders (installed with pip). Any point not in DC was removed.
• Remaining addresses were then validated to require a house number and street prefix using address.AddressParser (installed with pip). This removed points that fell in the river or parks etc.
• Remaining points were then checked against DC census tract IDs to make sure that each tract was represented.
• Tracts not represented were added using the census tract centerpoints provided from the Tiger Census 2010 database using cenpy (installed with pip). NB that cenpy only works in python2.7
• New tract center latitudes and longitudes were again address validated. Only 7 were not valid, and so those points were manually moved the smallest distance possible to a valid address.

These points were sampled every 3 minutes for 4 weeks from February 3 to March 2, 2016.

###Data Dictionary The following fields are available in the data download:

• "timestamp" : string, Date and Time (EST) when API was pinged
• "surge_multiplier": float, The surge multiplier for the current time and location
• "expected_wait_time": integer, The number of seconds rider may have to wait between requesting a car, and the car's arrival
• "product_type": string, The type of car -

• uberTAXI
• UberSUV
• UberBLACK
• uberX + Car Seat
• uberX
• uberXL
• SUV + Car Seat
• BLACK CAR + Car Seat

• "low_estimate": integer, lower end of an estimated price of the ride (dollars)
• "high_estimate": integer, upper end of an estimated price of the ride (dollars)
• "start_location_id": integer, number between 0-275 that relates to our predetermined longitudes and latitudes across DC.
• "end_location_id": integer, number between 0-275 that relates to our predetermined longitudes and latitudes across DC.

#Requirements If you use the Anaconda distribution, you're all set.

• Python 3 (does not work in python 2)
• ipython notebook / Jupyter
• pandas
• numpy
• matplotlib.pyplot
• scipy.stats (for pearsonr)
• seaborn
• statsmodels.formula.api
• statsmodels.graphics.api (for abline_plot)

#Funding This project was funded by a grant from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism to study computational and data journalism in the context of algorithmic accountability reporting.

#Feedback Email Jennifer A Stark at [email protected]