New York City's Outer Boroughs Tip Their Green Cabs the Best

For a data-mapping assignment in my Interactive Fundamentals class, I was tasked with finding a location-based data set, and creating a map visualizing it. I picked the Green Taxi Data from New York City's Open Data Portal. This set was huge, to say the least. It has over 1 million rows of data in it, and crashed my browser a handful of times. I decided to focus solely on the tipping data for the first few hours of New Year's Day, as it was more manageable and more uniform.

From there, I used the mapping application CartoDB to further pare down the data to the top 1,000 tips and create a color-based map based on the drop-off coordinates. What I found was that New York City's outer boroughs and communities were the most generous in their tips, as opposed to downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. This was mostly a function of the further distance these trips garnered. I'd like to keep working with this data set because of how vast it is.