This is a brief project assessing the impact of sudden COVID-related school closures and openings on MTA ridership in NYC.
Data sources: MTA turnstile data, timeline of public declarations and restrictions in NY State and NYC from Jan 2020 - April 2021.
Short answer: Sudden school closures and openings did not have a detectable impact on MTA ridership. Folks from NYC might not be surprised by this result, but I was!
Implications: This sort of analysis (using sudden closures/openings due to COVID19-related restrictions) may be useful to municipalities in understanding their operations. Future planning of maintenance, staffing, and renovations could be informed by case studies like this.
Contents:
- module1DataAnalysis-michael-town-covid19Project.py is the code that processes the MTA data, plots figures.
- schoolClosureImpactOnMTARidership-michael-town.pdf is a more in-depth summary of the results.
Contact me with any questions!