TLC, RUDIN CENTER & GOOGLE
HOST FIRST-EVER TAXI DATA HACKATHON
Can Big Data Improve Rush Hour Taxi Availability?
A small army of civic hackers came together recently to solve one of the city’s most elusive mysteries: how do we make it easier to catch a cab in Manhattan during the afternoon shift change? The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and the New York University (NYU) Rudin Center for Transportation hosted an all-day Hackathon on April 11, sponsored by Google. Members from government, academia, data enthusiasts, and civic technologists sifted through taxi and for-hire vehicle trip records to address this shift-change issue from technical, economic, logistical and policy angles.
As the data experts dispersed into smaller working groups to attack the problem, five veteran cabbies with more than a century of collective experience brought perspective to the process, representing the human element among the mathematical calculations of taxi drivers’ daily experiences.
“This was a perfect storm of intellect and information, and practical insight,” said TLC Commissioner and Chair Meera Joshi. “It brought fresh eyes to an issue with which New Yorkers have wrestled for decades and has the potential to result in data-grounded solutions for the over 60,000 individual and corporate owners and drivers of the City’s 13,587 medallion taxicabs and their passengers.
“I’d like to thank Director Mitchell Moss and Digital Manager Sarah Kaufman from NYU’s Rudin Center, for their shared enthusiasm in this project and Google, for their invaluable support in making it happen. I would also like to thank the taxi drivers, whose insights brought life to the statistics analyzed. Last, but not least, I’d like to thank the TLC staff who worked so hard to make this a success, most especially its architect, Rodney Stiles, as well as Jeff Roth, Joanne Rausen, Emily Genser, Justine Johnson, Ben Kurland, Anthony Migliore, Michael Anderson and Greg Gordon.”
Commissioner Joshi kicked off the day with welcoming remarks for the data devotees, as did Rudin Center Director Mitchell L. Moss, who put the awesome scale of the New York City taxi fleet into perspective with a reminder that it is larger than the entire public transportation systems of many cities.