I work part-time as a bartender, and two of my shifts are night shifts. That means I have to get home at 2 am or sometimes even 4-5 am. I work in Midtown and live in Astoria – 25-35 minutes by train. As much as I want to save money, taking trains at night time might be dangerous, especially for a lady. Plus, subway construction never stops in New York City, which makes the time of waiting for a train and getting home unpredictable. In order to feel safe and get home faster I take cabs. 

To everyone who works in the restaurant industry or any other industry that includes night shifts, to those who take cabs once in a while and to anyone who is just curios in general, I offer the research on cheapest cab rides in New York City based on my own experience.

Yellow Taxi is very common in New York City, however, since Taxi Apps appeared in the city a few years ago, it became popular very fast. There are a few reasons for that. First, you don’t have to walk to the main street to catch a cab, you are getting picked up from your location. Second, you can see how far away your driver is through the application and communicate with him/her. Third, the prices of taxi apps are fixed. It means that you are not going to be charged for extra time while in traffic. And, last but not least, most of the time it is cheaper.

I have four Taxi Apps in my phone: Lyft, Juno, Uber and Via. A lot of people like Lyft, but for me Lyft has been the most expensive out of the four. I used Juno a lot few years ago until Uber came up with an option of sharing a ride. For a few months, it worked great. Instead of $28 you could pay $14 and share a car with up to 2-3 other people which are getting dropped off on different locations on the way to your destination. It was very comfortable until the price of Uber Pool increased so much that the difference between regular Uber and Uber Pool would be only $3-4. The ride-sharing then had stopped making sense. Instead of getting a ride by yourself in a car for 20 minutes, you pick up and drop off 3 other people and get home in 1 hour for almost the same price as regular non-shared ride. That became the time to discover new Taxi Apps. Then I downloaded Via. Via shared rides were almost always cheaper for the first few weeks of using it. Then, thanks to Uber analytical team which doesn’t like to lose customers, I started to get random promotions of 20 to 50% on UberPool rides. This fact made Uber and Via my favorites. Every time Uber offers me a promotion, I use UberPool. Other times I use Via. Even though I was sure that I use Via a lot more often, my data research showed the opposite. 

The data I am analyzing in my project has been collected since I began to use Via: the middle of February 2019 to the middle of October 2019 from the history of rides in Uber and Via apps. The data points are ID of the ride, App name, Date, Pick Up Location (usually the driver of shared rides picks you up 2-3 blocks away from your location in order to save time). To show all pick up locations on the map, I converted the exact addresses into longitude and latitude, using LatLong.net.

On very first Bar chart we can see that I’ve used UberPool a lot more often than Via Shared. Let us explore the reasons behind that. Since I had available data on exact addresses from which I was picked up, I decided to create a map that shows how far they are from my job. The variety of pick up spots is very large: some of them are few steps away, some of them – few blocks. There are only three blue circles on the map, which means comparing to UberPool, Via had picked me up from only few spots. Let’s explore them by creating a bubble chart where the size of each bubble shows how many times I was picked up from the exact location. Now we can see the difference between two apps very well. Via Shared usually uses the same spots to pick up the passenger, while UberPool pick up area is very large. The diversity of UberPool pick up locations is shown on the bar chart to the right from the bubble chart. Even though Via Shared is more consistent in its pick up locations, they are not always closer to my job.

On the second Dashboard we explore the financial aspect of the research. We already know that I’ve used UberPool more times than I’ve used Via Shared. To show overall amount of spent money and the amount I’ve spent on each taxi app, I chose the donut chart. Since I’ve used UberPool almost twice more than Via Shared, the difference in amounts of money I’ve spent on each of them is visible. On the bar chart to the right I separated my rides per month. Surprisingly, the dominance of used Taxi App keeps changing. The main decision of choosing my favorite Taxi App I have to make by exploring the average price of the rides for each app. On the dot charts for both applications we can see that Via prices are a lot more stable than Uber’s. However, Uber’s average ride cost is $2 lower than Via’s.

I would like to introduce you to the winner of my research – UberPool. The last thing I want to bring to your attention is I have been using Uber for over 5 years to get promotions of up to 50% off on all rides. Always do your own research before assuming the price will be the same for you.