Impacts of Weather

Here we looked into the correlations between weather and ridership. We observed if rain or extreme temperatures correlated with a change in ridership. 

Overall, there was little to no correlation between weather and ridership. Even when separating the precipitation between low precipitation and high precipitation days, there still was not a lot of correlation between the factors. This can be attributed to people who don’t have access to a car and need to use public transportation to get to work or school. 

These graphs show that for weekends in 2025, there was a positive correlation between total rides per day and the average temperature for that day. This could be because not as many people have to go to school or work on the weekends, so whether or not they choose to take public transit could depend more on variables like temperature. I compared this to 2024, which had a similar correlation on weekends. 

Here there is a positive correlation between total rides per day and average temperature on school days for 2024 and 2025. This suggests that students tend to take public transportation to school when temperatures are higher, but have other modes of transportation available when it is colder. Although it could be expected that no matter the temperature, many students rely on public transportation to get to school, there was a relatively strong correlation. 

The graph above displays the amount of precipitation in inches, throughout the whole year, diving up the year by seasons. The major attention grabber in this graph is a day right in the middle of summer, that had almost 2.5 inches of rain fall throughout the day, sequentially, the ridership for that specific day fell by about 10,000 - 5,000 rides, which might have had something to do with the rain that day, but there’s nothing that says this is 100% true. This can be seen on other days throughout the year. There also seems to be a pattern involving rain where it appears to rain the most during the summer. 

Here we see that on days with rain there is slightly less ridership than on days without rain, but it is a relatively insignificant amount. For temperature there is a slight increase in the amount of daily ridership on days above 50 Fahrenheit in comparison to under 50 Fahrenheit. Therefore, rain and temperature have a slight relationship with ridership, with rain correlating with less ridership and higher temperatures correlating with more ridership. However, these trends were much less strong than we initially expected.