When talking about New York City, it’s hard to skip its nightlife. The scene is well known for both the vibrance and diversity. As the sunset west and the lights and neons lit, New Yorkers and visitors gather at bars and clubs to party their night. However, what happens when the city is resting, and the party animals decide to get some sleep? Another modern scene of tipsy or drunk people getting Ubers home arises. It can be intuitive to think that when the bars and clubs are closing, Ubers will be gathering around them.
To test this hypothesis, I pulled up the Uber pickup data and bars and clubs’ locations from Yelp and mapped them on a New York map to interpret the relationship.
Uber Pickup Trend at NYC Midnight
I plotted out the Uber pickups in New York City from 0 AM to 3 AM. I set the Uber pickup markers to be translucent green, so we can easily read that the greener the area, the denser the Uber pickup is. From the four maps, we can clearly see the trend. At 0 AM, Uber pickups are scattered across the lower Manhattan and Williamsburgh. As time goes to 1 and 2 AM, the Uber pickups cluster at Meatpacking, West Village, Lower East, Little Italy, and Williamsburgh’s little bit. The number of Uber pickup peaks at 3 AM, with Meatpacking and West Village, shines the brightest. And the city went quiet at 4 AM.
Locating Uber Pickups, Bars, and Clubs
I then plotted the bars and clubs’ locations to the map to see the relationship between bars and clubs’ locations and the Uber pickup at midnight. On the map of bars and clubs alone, we can read that the bars are more spread out than clubs; however, both bars and clubs are located primarily at Chelsea, Meatpacking, and Little Italy.
Finally, when we put them all together, we can see that the hypothesis is positive but still need more explanations. Take the map at 1 AM as an example. We can see that the areas of Meatpacking and Little Italy are covered with Ubers. Ubers are also gathering in the Williamsburgh area. These areas proved the hypothesis.
However, there is a Uber vacuum area at Times Square, a bar-and-club-dense area. In this map. Looking back to other times of the night, we can see that some Uber pickups appear in this area at 3 AM. But the amount is significantly lower than in other bar-and-club-dense areas.
