Use Case — YellowLine NYC

Fictional yellow-taxi operator · NYC TLC-inspired data

Story Animation

Client

YellowLine NYC — a fictional NYC yellow-taxi operator (inspired by TLC public trip data, not a real company). They operate across all five boroughs and compete with ride-hail on price, wait time, and driver earnings.

Business challenge

Trip volume is stable, but revenue per mile and driver utilization vary by hour, borough, and route. Leadership suspects they are:

Over-supplying taxis in low-demand zones at the wrong times
Under-pricing or mis-allocating fleet during peak windows
Losing visibility because reports are built manually from spreadsheets

They need an analytics platform their SQL-heavy internal team can maintain after MHP leaves.

Success criteria

#	Criterion	How the training proves it
1	Ingest TLC trip data reliably	Bronze layer in all three tool tracks
2	Clean, enriched trip records	Silver with quality rules + zone lookup
3	Answer 12 operational KPI questions	Gold layer (identical KPIs across platforms)
4	Executive dashboard	Power BI on Gold tables
5	Team can extend pipelines	Snowflake SQL + dbt maintainability story
6	Documented lineage and quality	dbt docs, tests, lineage graph
7	Informed platform choice	Module 7 open discussion

Data source

Azure ADLS2: mhpdeworkshopsa / nyc-taxi-data
├── raw/trips/          → yellow_tripdata_*.parquet
└── raw/lookup/         → taxi_zone_lookup.csv

Technical detail: Architecture · Data model

Priya’s five KPI questions

When are our peak revenue hours?
Which pickup zones drive the most trips?
Which routes are most popular?
How does revenue vary by borough and distance band?
Are we losing money on bad data (null fares, zero-distance trips)?

All five map to the 12 Gold tables in the data model reference.

The Three Constraints

Three constraints to weigh all day

Marcus will judge every recommendation against three orthogonal dimensions. Keep them in your head from the story introduction to Module 7 — Elena revisits them in the wrap-up.

Constraint	Marcus’s question	Where it lands
Cost	Can YellowLine NYC afford this in year 3?	Module 7 Round 2 Card B
Performance	Fast enough for live dispatch later?	Module 8 streaming
Compliance	Audit-ready lineage by Q3?	Module 4 dbt; Module 7 Card D

By end of day you should answer all three — not just “which tool is best?”