NYC-Transport Readme

This is a combined repository of all publicly available New York City transit datasets.

• Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) Taxi trip Data
• FOIA requested Uber trip data for portions of 2013-2015
• Subway turnstile data from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA)
• Citibike system data

This repository contains code to download all the data, clean it, remove corrupted data, and produce a set of pandas dataframes, which are written to Parquet format files using Dask and Fastparquet.

These Parquet format files are repartitioned on disk with PySpark, and resulting files are queried with PySpark SQL and Dask to produce data science results in Jupyter notebooks.

Requirements

• Python 3.4+

• Beautiful Soup 4

• Bokeh

• Dask Distributed

• FastParquet

• Geopandas

• Jupyter

• Numba 0.29+

• Palettable

• PyArrow

• PySpark 2.0.2+

• Python-Snappy

• Scikit-Learn

• Seaborn

A tutorial on my blog shows how to set up an environment compatible with this analysis on Ubuntu. This tutorial has been tested locally and on Amazon EC2.

If you want to skip obtaining and processing the raw Taxi/Uber data into Parquet format, the processed dataset is available on Academic Torrents here.

Steps

1. Setup your conda environment with the modules above.

   conda install -c conda-forge \
       beautifulsoup4 bokeh distributed fastparquet geopandas \
       jupyter numba palettable pyarrow python-snappy  \
       scikit-learn seaborn
   conda install -c quasiben spark
   

2. Download the data in the 00_download_scripts directory

   • ./make_directories.sh -- Alternatively you can create a raw_data directory elsewhere and symlink it.
   • python download-subway-data.py (~ 10 GB)
   • ./download-bike-data.sh (~7 GB)
   • ./download-taxi-data.sh (~250 GB)
   • ./download-uber-data.sh (~5 GB)
   • ./decompress.sh

3. Convert the data to parquet format using scripts in 05_raw_to_dataframe. Times given are on a 4GHz i5-3570K (4 core) with fast SSD and 16GB memory.

   • Adjust config.json to have correct input and output paths for your system
   • python convert_bike_csv_to_parquet.py (~2 hours)
   • python convert_subway_to_parquet.py (~2 hours)
   • python convert_taxi_to_parquet.py (~32 hours)

4. Repartition and recompress the parquet files for efficient access using PySpark in 06_repartition. This is especially useful for later stages, where queries are performed on Amazon EC2 using a distributed Spark engine using files on S3.

Analysis

Analysis scripts and notebooks live in the 15_dataframe_analysis directory. Some require PySpark 2+, but most simply require Dask and Jupyter.