Geopandas plot makes label for every datapoint instead of a colorbar

Question

This is my simple code:

gdf_MA_outage.plot(column = 'total_customers_affected_by_city' , cmap = 'OrRd' , figsize = (16,16) , legend = True)

'total_customers_affected_by_city' ranges from 1 to 200000. Instead of making a colorbar, it makes a label for every row in that column. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

total_customers_affected_by_city must be a string so it is treated as a categorical. Change it to a numeric column and you will get a color bar. Code below shows what you describe where I have deliberately set column to be a string rather than numeric.

import geopandas as gpd
import numpy as np

gdf_MA_outage = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path("naturalearth_lowres")).loc[
    lambda d: (d["continent"] == "Europe") & (~d["iso_a3"].isin(["-99", "RUS"]))
]

gdf_MA_outage["total_customers_affected_by_city"] = np.random.randint(1, 200000, len(gdf_MA_outage)).astype(str)

gdf_MA_outage.plot(
    column="total_customers_affected_by_city",
    cmap="OrRd",
    figsize=(16, 16),
    legend=True,
)