We explored the impact of Columbia students on the Morningside Heights community and also analyzed their top go-to destinations in New York with 311 Complaint data and Yellow Cab data. This data could not only be useful for potential advertisers who could understand the wants and needs of Columbia students, but also car-hailing app companies such as Lyft and Uber who could optimize their driver positions near Columbia.
From top 10 complaints, we saw UTILITIES (heating, street condition, water system etc.) and NOISE were two main concerns.We wondered what kind of noise specifically is bothering the neighbourhood, we further did word cloud analysis on "descriptor" column of the data set. As we expected, "Music PartyLoud" stood out, which is typical of a college neighbourhood.
NYU had the same noise and loud party music complaints, in addition to other similar complaints such as street condition and homeless people.
To isolate whether or not Columbia and NYU college students caused such loud party music complaints, we assessed the top complaints near the Upper East Side, which boasts a demographic with very different lifestyles and sleep times. UES had top complaints for street condition and driver parking violations, rather than the loud party music that defined NYC colleges.
We drew the Yellow Cab Taxi data from 2015 and used SQL query to extract trips where pick up location is near Columbia University
Most of the drop offs were concentrated in the Upper West Side, so we focused on drop offs below Columbus Circle 59th Street. Given Columbia student’s penchant for finance, we were not surprised to find a clear hub of drop offs near Goldman Sachs and Citibank. See more maps down here. Click here for a detailed report of this project.