(Autumn 2019) This research was conducted as part of a University of Michigan graduate course entitled Urban Informatics. Data was pulled from the City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal. Final results were presented in poster format (see right) with data visualizations produced in ArcGIS and R; conclusions from the study have been reproduced below.
Previous urban ridesharing research analyses, such as those by Dilahunt et al. (2017) and Atkinson-Palombo et al. (2019), have explored the barriers which certain underserved communities face in using services like Uber or Lyft. One theorized barrier has been that the cost of rides in low-income neighborhoods may be greater due to a reluctance of drivers to operate there (in turn leading to “surge” pricing schemes which aim to balance demand and available supply). With October 2019 marking the first anniversary of publicly available ridesharing data from the city of Chicago, I designed this study to examine that new data and to continue to investigate how ridesharing services may be inequitable for marginalized and low-income communities.
Among Chicago’s ridership data for the past year (October 2018-2019), the census tracts with the lowest median household incomes are generating significantly fewer rides than their more affluent peers. While these results are inherently inconclusive without personally identifiable data on the riders themselves, this seems a strong indicator that, as Dillahunt et al. observed, ridesharing services are indeed more inaccessible to low-income communities. At the same time, those rides which are being generated from low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be a further, longer-lasting drive than those coming from more affluent areas of Chicago. This factor may mark another inequity not only among services like Uber and Lyft but among all transit in general: that the burden of travel falls more heavily on the poor. These findings align with general observations about transit among the planning field.
That being said, it is also important to note that the average total cost of all rides in Chicago, across neighborhoods of varying income levels, appears to be more or less constant at a rate hovering around $14. While this finding counters Dillahunt et al.’s prediction that low-income communities may be paying premiums to hail rides in low-supply areas (as shown, these communities actually appear to be paying less for each mile traveled), it does mean that residents of these communities are still paying just as much as we would expect their most affluent peers to pay for ridesharing services. The cause of this consistency remains unknown and would make an intriguing topic for further investigation.
aaron krusniak 