NYC TLC taxi trip records

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After the parade

The 2024 NYC Pride march concluded on June 30 around 6 PM. In the four hours that followed, hundreds of thousands of attendees dispersed to bars, dinners, after-parties, and homes across the five boroughs. The taxi drop-off pattern shows you exactly where the post-parade economy lives.

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The taxi data found the cellular dead zones

Every yellow cab logs its trip to the TLC's central server in real time. When the cellular signal drops, the meter buffers the trip locally and uploads it later. The TLC published the flag that marks these buffered trips. They probably did not realize they were also publishing a map of NYC's cellular dead spots.

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What the congestion toll did to yellow cabs

On January 5, 2025, the Congestion Relief Zone toll went live. Battery Park lost 40% of its yellow cab pickups. World Trade Center dropped 22%. The TLC trip records show which zones the toll hit hardest — and which barely moved.

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The tip tells you where you are

Yellow cab tip percentages by pickup zone don't track the income map as neatly as you'd expect. Airport runs, tourist corridors, and short hops have their own tipping logic — all of it baked into every credit card receipt since 2008.

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NYC at 3 am

Every yellow cab drop-off between midnight and 5 am in 2023, aggregated by zone. The East Village handles more late-night arrivals than most of the outer boroughs combined. The nocturnal city has a geography — and it's not where you think.

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The black car takeover

In 2017 there were more yellow cab trips than Uber and Lyft combined. By 2023 it wasn't close. Seven years of TLC data tells the story of the largest disruption in urban transportation since the car replaced the horse.

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The taxi data is coming

1.5 billion rows of NYC taxi trips. The largest mobility dataset any U.S. city publishes — and the first to include the new Manhattan congestion-toll field. Why it doesn't fit our live-Socrata pattern, and what the planned pipeline looks like.