VISUAL ESSAY / ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING

Spatiotemporal Ride Demand Forecasting

FILM INDEX / JUMP TO AN ACT
FIELD GUIDE

Tomorrow's Rides Leave Clues

Ride requests appear unevenly across a city and change from one period to the next. A quiet zone can become busy while a neighboring zone empties, leaving drivers in the wrong places if dispatch relies only on the latest request count.

The film shows demand as a moving pattern over city cells. Its forecasting model combines each cell's recent activity with signals from nearby places and earlier times, then predicts where requests are likely to appear next. The comparison with observed demand reveals what is gained by treating location and time together. This matters operationally because vehicle repositioning, staffing, and expected passenger wait all depend on where demand will be, not merely on its citywide total. The displayed map is an explanation of the spatiotemporal idea; a useful forecast would still need to be tested on data beyond the examples used to train it.