Estimate the Pandemic-Era Percentage Drop in Taxi and Ride-Hailing Trips
Company: LinkedIn
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Estimate the percentage decrease in cab rides after COVID-19 arrived, compared with the period before it. The interviewer does not specify a place, a type of ride or a time window, so scope those yourself, then walk through your structure, each assumption and the arithmetic, and finish with one number and a sanity check.
```hint Not every ride fell equally
Asking how "rides" changed in total is hard to reason about. Look for a way to split rides into groups that the pandemic affected for different reasons, and estimate each group on its own.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which geography: one city, one country, or the whole world? A dense city with heavy office commuting and tourism behaves very differently from a car-dependent region.
- Do "cab rides" mean only street-hail and dispatched taxis, or app-based ride-hailing trips as well?
- Which windows are being compared: the strict lockdown months, the partial-reopening period, or the time after restrictions ended, each against the same calendar months a year earlier?
- Is the measure the number of trips, or the money spent on them?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A pinned scope (place, ride types, comparison windows) that removes seasonality, chosen before any numbers appear.
- An equation that ties the drop to drivers that changed for different reasons, such as remote work, closed venues, collapsed air travel and reluctance to share an enclosed car.
- Explicitly labeled assumptions with round numbers, and correct arithmetic.
- A cross-check through a second method or reference point, and a view on how sensitive the result is to the window chosen.
### Follow-up Questions
- How would your estimate differ between a dense, transit-heavy city and a car-dependent one?
- If you worked at a ride-hailing company, which internal data would you pull to replace your assumptions, and which kind of trip would you expect to recover first?
- Why might app-based ride-hailing and traditional taxis recover at different speeds?
Overview: An estimation question asking by what percentage taxi and ride-hailing trips fell after COVID-19 arrived compared with before. It tests scoping the place, ride types and comparison window, breaking trips down by purpose, labeling assumptions, doing clean arithmetic and sanity-checking the final number.