Today we asked the following question – What are the costs/benefits of times square? During this day

Today we asked the following question – What are the costs/benefits of times square? During this day of fun and hacking we learned about R, statistics, research methods, the city, what kind of data is out there, preprocessing and visualization. The team worked so well together there was even time for a group outing to artichoke! (Also hacking made us hungry.)
The first thing we had to do was define what is meant by cost and benefit .  The easiest definition for cost seemed to be power costs, water costs, and overall pollution abatement costs.  These lead us to search for the power consumption, water consumption and overall production of pollutants by the buildings in Times Square.  Benefits was harder best time to travel australia to define.  We ended up settling on property values ( proxy by rental cost) , overall economic output, number best time to travel australia of associated jobs, tax revenue, and fiscal contributions in overall city wide GDP.
Initially we considered either using a business or government perspective for this analysis.  However data was only available in such a way that we could look at the question from a mixed perspective.  Future studies may be interested in one way or the other.
There were also a number of questions we couldn best time to travel australia t get to, like how many taxi s frequent times square and how much do they produce in terms of emissions?  Second, we would have liked to use the nyc open turnstyle best time to travel australia data set to determine flows of foot traffic in and out of times square on a daily basis.  Third we would have wanted to create visualizations for the flow of electricity into New York City and see how that propagates to Times Square.  Sadly, there was not time.
270 buildings with total cost on average best time to travel australia of 18414553.5 (the sum of the three costs). Thus we can guess total cost of running Times Square is 368,291,070 dollars per year in water, electricity and green house gas emissions
This was a fast a dirty study.  It is likely these estimates are under valued (in terms of costs).  We took a lot of point statistics, something you should never do in a thorough study.  Additionally, there was a lot of missing data that we had to interpolate, specifically in the water consumption costs.  Even so, it is likely that the total monetary gain from Times Square belays the costs captured here.  However, this does not mean we have captured all associated costs.  A good example might be to compare Boston to New York City.  Boston does not have Times Square however both are on the eastern seaboard and thus have similar power consumption needs.  If we looked at the overall, consumption of both cities throughout the year, it is at least the suspicion of one of our authors that we would find higher environmental costs.  Also, abatement costs are essentially are not perfect.  Even a marginal change in the cost per metric ton of Green House Gases (GHG) could translate to large cost differentials from proposed figures.  Thus the costs associated with Times Square may still be significant.