Taxi Map

The taxi card shows where New York taxis go and how they charge for it.

Seen from afar, New York can appear like a horned ocean of automobiles and cabs, with the latter having the greatest visible effect (and probably the most horned). GIS guru Esri via Maps Mania gives us a glimpse - an aggregated view, if you will - of a year's living in the Big Apple, made up of the city's taxi rides.

On the Taxi Cab's map, you can zoome in and learn about the hundreds of thousands of trips that begin and end in the New York City and New Jersey subway areas using NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission information. The map shows how different New York districts use cabs and how they charge for their journeys. The map shows the dates of the yellows from July 2015 to June 2016.

Esri's John Nelson then looks at socio-economic information to look for factors that could affect the use and payment of taxi trips in different parts of the city. This map shows the places where most New York taxi trips start, where taxi riders can look forward to the best advice, where customers are paying for their tickets in hard currency and where they are more likely to take out loans.

Most of the taxi rides take place on the Manhattan Isle. Concerning tip, the card looks at the dates of each taxi trip on the basis of the place of its origins and its end point - both give insight into the movement of the town. On the basis of the pick-up point, taxi drivers can look forward to abnormally large gratuities when they arrive in Bayonne, NJ, Staten Iceland - and essentially nowhere in Manhattan, Hoboken or most of Brooklyn, where the gratuity seems to be fairly constant at around 11 per cent, according to the map.

Gratuities in the northwestern Queens-areas are between 5 and 10 per cent, and near La Guardia and the Grand Central Parkway groups with higher gratuities appear. If you look at the drop-off dates, things don't really get much different in Manhattan, but in some Queen's neighbourhoods arrival and departure differ so much that they're willing to break out.

Bar or credits? Map information suggests that Manhattan and bridge-linked neighbourhoods, as well as the New Jersey and Staten Island coastlines, mostly pay with a single debit cards, as do the areas around the airport between them. Brooklyn and parts of Queens, on the other side, were paying about 80 per cent of the times in hard currency, as were the quarters in south-western Queens.

Further information we can get is how many travellers are trying to get into a taxi, with the largest crew trying to curl up in Staten Island, Central Park and Theater District, Brooklyn and along east Queens and Jersey lanes, as well as the length of the journeys, with the travel time of the departing staff averaging more than an hours and the fastest hop taking place in Manhattan.

Look at the map for yourself, just to remind yourself next times that you are counted the minute of an unending taxi ride: you are not alone out there.