Reaching out to underserved areas in Chicago to increase business growth and profitability for taxi companies
I used Google Cloud’s BigQuery public dataset on Chicago’s taxi trips and Tableau to investigate where the underserved areas are located and whether taxi companies should reach out to these areas with lower demand to unlock greater growth.
To supplement the taxi trips dataset, I retrieved information on Chicago’s neighbourhood boundaries from Chicago Data Portal and used BeautifulSoup to scrape information on the population densities in the 30 most densely populated neighbourhoods. As there were some inconsistencies in the neighbourhood names in both datasets (e.g. Archer Hts vs. Archer Heights), I performed some text cleaning using Natural Language Processing before joining the 2 datasets.
Over the years, the number of pickups varies widely across community areas in Chicago, with the most pickups located near Streeterville. However, there are also several pockets of underserved areas spread out across the city. Let’s find out where these areas are located.
The 10 areas with the least pickups evolved over the years. From 2013 to 2016, these areas are concentrated closer to the South. From 2017 to 2019, these previous pockets dispersed to the central regions and closer to the North.
That said, there are several community areas such as 52, 54, 55 and 74 that were consistently underserved. This could be because these areas are not among the densely populated neighbourhood, hence taxi companies are channelling their resources to more densely populated areas to reach out to more customers.
However, from 2019 to 2020, new underserved community areas 18 and 64 emerged. They are near Belmont Cragin and Archer Heights which are among the top 30 densely populated neighbourhood.
There are several amenities such as shopping malls, grocery stores in these 2 neighbourhoods, and customers may want or need a convenient ride if they are carrying multiple loots after shopping. Hence, Chicago taxi companies may consider diverting more taxis here to meet the projected demand to boost their revenue.
There are still areas for improvement in this dashboard. Some of my next steps are:
- to spatially join the 2 maps, such that the map of underserved areas in Belmon and Archer Heights overlays on top on their corresponding population densities polygon
- to drill down on the time of day that customers visit these 2 areas, so that taxi companies can make data-informed decisions on the approximate timings in which there are potentially more customers, and reach out to them as quickly as possible to boost their earnings.
The potential use cases for such analysis are aplenty. For instance, restaurants that offer delivery or team up with delivery aggregators can boost their business growth by uncovering these underserved communities. This strategy could empower restaurant industries to cater to the changing preferences of increasingly time-challenged consumers living in increasingly connected homes, who like the experience of a restaurant meal — only eaten at home.
Thank you very much for reading :) If you enjoyed it, hit applause button and the like button on my LinkedIn post, it would mean a lot to me and it would help others to see the story. You can view the interactive dashboard here too. Let me know what you think by reaching out!
Stay safe, take care and have a great day! :)
