Services like Uber and Lyft may be rattling the taxi industry across the US, but there are still a lot of people hailing cabs in New York City.
Try 1.1 billion rides over the last six years.
Late last year, that mind-boggling data set, released by the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, began to make software engineer Todd Schneider rather curious: What would 1.1 billion rides even look like?
So he compiled all those rides and transformed them into white and green dots — white for city cabs, green for outer borough taxis. Then he overlayed the individual trips on top of each other based on where people got picked up and where they got dropped off.
The resulting maps look like some strange, post-apocalyptic world in which Manhattan has absorbed all the energy from its neighboring boroughs.
As Schneider notes on his blog, there are a few interesting details about the maps.
The most telling difference between the two is how clustered pick-ups are near Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn hugging the East River compared to the sprawling green taxi coverage in the second map.
Schneider's interpretation of the data: "I think the outer borough drop-offs are from people who work or go out in Manhattan and take taxis home," he tells Tech Insider.
While people are taking trains into Manhattan in the morning, late nights and reduced subway service make hitching a ride in a cab look much more appealing (at least to those who can afford it).
Schneider points out that even if Brooklyn and Queens see more drop-offs than pick-ups, Manhattan still sees the most of both. It's just that popular.
It's also clear from the map that there are two well-lit veins running from Manhattan into Queens and Brooklyn, one of them much longer than the other. Those are trips to and from NYC's two airports, LaGuardia and JFK International.
The maps also show just how far-reaching (or not) the green outer borough taxis can be. The first map shows people getting picked up as far north as the Washington Heights neighborhood in Manhattan, and the second shows them getting dropped off in the Far Rockaways all the way at the bottom.
But there's also something of a dead zone in one triangular chunk of Queens, right where Brooklyn's border stops to the north.
That's because the Newtown Creek and Long Island Expressway cut straight through the area, which makes finding a cab practically impossible.
According to Schneider's map, the easiest way to hail a cab in these deserted areas is simply to wait for some other weary traveler to get dropped off. But New York never sleeps, so who knows when that could be?
