Taxi Industry Market Analysis

The Challenge: Making Sense of 30 Million Taxi Trips

Victoria's taxi market was facing major reform. Regulators needed a clear, evidence-based view of how supply and demand worked across the state to set sustainable fares. The problem: their data was vast, fragmented across multiple systems, and inconsistent.

Over 30 million trip records, plus driver shift logs, subsidy data, and licence records, had to be consolidated and analysed. Without a unified view, fare reviews risked being based on incomplete insights, which could harm both driver livelihoods and passenger accessibility.

Our FDE Approach: Engineering a Market Intelligence Platform

Using the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) model, our data engineers and econometric analysts embedded directly with the Essential Services Commission. Together, we designed and built a robust data product to transform raw data into regulatory insight.

Core components of the platform included:

• Data Consolidation & Cleansing: An automated pipeline integrated 30M+ trip records, shift data, subsidies, and licence files into a central SQL environment. It systematically removed anomalies, errors, and duplicates to create a trusted dataset.
• Segmentation Framework: We developed a model to break down the market into geographic (Airport, CBD, regional hubs) and behavioural segments (hail, pre-booked, social hours, disability subsidies) to understand each sub-market's unique dynamics.
• Market Analytics Engine: This engine produced key metrics such as demand patterns, driver waiting times, occupancy rates, trip distances, and fare revenue for every segment, allowing for granular analysis.
• Regulatory Dashboard: We productized the outputs into interactive dashboards with tables, graphs, and maps, making results accessible for decision-makers and allowing them to test fare scenarios and sensitivities.