As previously mentioned, Cabspotting has been getting successively less live GPS taxi data from Yellow Cab during the last few months, resulting in an anemic and much spindlier (spindlier?) view of San Francisco than is normal when it’s in a healthy state:
Being Stamen, of course we didn’t think to just pick up the phone and call Yellow Cab and ask them what was going on, but instead started making database queries and visualizations of taxi activity over time, and engaging in wild and baseless musings on what was happening. So, this (by Shawn):
The graph shows the last 6 months of activity, from May to November. And you can see both the number of cabs reporting and the number of points being reported go down in pretty much lock step. Mike speculated that Yellow Cab was switching their fleet over to a new GPS monitoring system, and switching the cabs out over time. A call to the dispatch confirmed that this is exactly what’s going on, and the switch is almost done. Yellow Cab’s told us that they’ll be restoring the feed in the next week or thereabouts, so we’ll be keeping our eyes open & hopefully the data will be back to normal shortly. And if you, like UC Berkeley’s Mobile Millenium Project, are using the data, please reach out and let us know.
Update, Nov 21: Everything’s back to normal. Lesson for the week: sometimes it’s just better to pick up the phone 🙂