Three Colours of Broadway (or: what Rent and Income may have to do with Taxi driving and the time Tweets hit the sack)

I divide blocks on Broadway in 3 groups according to rent and income. I then use these as dimensions when thinking about:

• taxi usage (pickups and dropoffs) 

• use of Twitter.

Some blocks on Broadway have low income but high rent (top left corner), whereas none shows the opposite trend (i.e. high income and low rent: bottom right corner). Notice that the blue and green clusters roughly represent respectively the poorest and the richest blocks of Broadway. Also notice how the green cluster has fewer points than the other two and roughly corresponds to the southern portion of Upper West Side (see plots below).

Above Central Park pickups reduce considerably. The longest tract on Broadway with a consistently high number of pickups is between Columbus Circle and 75th Street. Part of this tract coincides with the area with highest rent & highest income of Broadway (green cluster, previous plot).

Taxi dropoffs in NYC are far more homogeneous than pickups. Higher parts of Broadway (that show comparatively few pickups in the previous plot) have as many dropoffs as Upper West Side.

Do poor blocks of Broadway go to sleep later?

The blue group (low rent & low income) has an opposite day/night tweeting pattern than the other two groups. In the "blue blocks" of Broadway there are relatively few tweets per hour during the day time, but many after midnight (except for the weekends). The opposite is true for higher income areas.