After a violent year including the loss of two University of Chicago students’ lives to gun violence, the University responded with swift policy implementation in an effort to promote safety-conscious methods of transportation in Hyde Park. Beginning on October 1st, 2021, UChicago introduced the ''Lyft Ride Smart'' program which provides their students with 10 free Lyft rides per month (and up to $15 off per ride), as long as these rides start and end within the bounds of Hyde Park and are called between the hours of 5 pm to 4 am. We are ultimately interested in understanding whether the program meaningfully changed how UChicago students get around in Hyde Park. Our specific research question is testing if the implementation of the “Lyft Ride Smart” program impacted UChicago student decision-making by studying whether or not overall rideshare usage subsequently grew in the Hyde Park area.
- Public trip data is posted online by the City of Chicago. We also extract data for other covariates (via web-scraping) to solidify our theory
- Results are detailed in 'Research Paper.pdf'
- (HP = Hyde Park)
By Leo Shestakov & Emil Perdue