Got a Ride? Ridesharing Equity in Chicago
I expected Uber and Lyft pickups to cluster in white, wealthy Chicago neighborhoods. 42 million trips later, the data said no - the pickups go where the trips are, which mostly means downtown.
The Question
Uber and Lyft are now a meaningful share of Chicago's transit mix. Whether they reach the neighborhoods that need them is a separate question.
Guess: pickups skew toward wealthier, whiter community areas. The test set: 42 million anonymized rideshare trips from the City of Chicago's TNP dataset (every licensed rideshare pickup, Oct 2020 – Nov 2021), joined against Census income and race data across all 77 Community Areas.
Follow the Pickups
The whole city
Every rideshare pickup Chicago logged from October 2020 to November 2021, shaded by volume: 41.9 million pickups across 77 community areas. Most of the map is pale. The dark core isn't.
Darker teal = more pickups (log scale, 25K to 6.0M)
Six areas take nearly half
The Near North Side, Near West Side, Lake View, the Loop, West Town, and Lincoln Park account for 45.6% of every pickup in the city. The Near North Side alone logs 6.0 million - jobs, nightlife, hotels, and two train stations' worth of demand.
Outlined: the six busiest community areas
The South and West Sides ride too
If pickups skewed white and wealthy, the map would go quiet here. It doesn't. Austin, 94% nonwhite, logs 938K pickups. South Shore logs 605K, Englewood 317K, Washington Park 187K. Demand follows jobs and transit gaps, not demographics.
Now shaded by % nonwhite residents (purple = higher); outlined areas named above
Forest Glen barely calls a ride
The city's second-richest community area: $124K median income, 66K pickups in 14 months. The Near North Side, at a similar income, logged 90 times more. Up here almost everyone owns a car - wealth predicts car ownership, and car ownership replaces rideshare.
Back to pickup shading; Forest Glen outlined
Pickups follow trips, not people
Nine community areas top $100K median income, and their pickup counts run from 41K to 6.0 million. Income doesn't predict demand; density and destinations do. The hypothesis - that rideshare quietly favors richer, whiter neighborhoods - doesn't survive the map.
The scatter below makes the same case in one frame
Pickups vs. Income
Key Numbers
The Same Map, Twice
Findings
- Hypothesis: disproven. Pickup volume doesn't track income or share of white residents at the Community Area level. Whatever rideshare is doing in Chicago, it isn't quietly skewing toward whiter, richer neighborhoods.
- High income can mean low demand. One of Chicago's highest-income areas had among the fewest pickups - those residents own cars and drive themselves.
- Pickups follow trips, not people. The Loop, the Near North Side, and the big employment corridors dominate, full stop. That's where people actually need rides - regardless of who lives there.
- Income and race are nearly the same map. The two choropleths are visual near-mirrors of each other in Chicago. Any single-variable equity test runs into that wall before it can say much.