Turns out, there is.
The most popular corners to catch a yellow cab in Manhattan can now be pinpointed, at any hour of any day of the week, thanks to a record of 90 million actual taxi trips that have been silently tracked by the city.
On a Saturday at 11 p.m., it is easier to hail a cab on the nightclub-and-bar-filled Lower East Side than at Grand Central Terminal. Columbus Circle gets more passenger pickups than the Port Authority bus station. And make sure you are in the right neighborhood: taxi rides are 25 times as likely to start in the West Village as in Washington Heights.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission hopes the information, collected by GPS, can be used to create helpful tie-ins for customers, like a new smartphone program that lets mobile users locate the ideal nearby corner to hail a cab.
But the data also present a grand urban portrait, the first detailed record of a fast-moving, yellow-hued transit network that offers a curbside view of how New Yorkers move around and where they do it.
Take the morning rush. Topping the list for 9 a.m. Monday cab hails are, not surprisingly, Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central, the great commuter gateways to the city’s major business district.
But not far behind are two Manhattan intersections seemingly far from the hubbub: York Avenue at 72nd Street, and Tenth Avenue at 43rd.
Each can get as many morning taxi hails as a spot on Vanderbilt Avenue, directly adjacent to Grand Central.
The numbers, tabulated from a six-month period, tell a tale of a changing city.
A thicket of high-rise condominiums has grown up along 10th and 11th Avenues in Midtown, creating a pocket of marooned commuters who may hop a cab rather than trek to the train.
And residents of Yorkville, long starved for subway access, commonly commute by taxi to Midtown or the financial district.
Late-night and weekend patterns are distinctly different. At 3 a.m. on a Sunday, passengers stumble into more cabs at 10th Avenue and 27th Street in Chelsea than anywhere else in the city. About as many taxi trips begin there at that hour on average as at 9 a.m. on a weekday at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station.
Taxi trips may also offer a more objective guide to night-life trends than Zagat: late-night pickups in the meatpacking district dominate other popular areas like Sheridan Square and St. Marks Place. The East Village barely cracks the top 10 on early Sunday mornings, but if you need a cab, try Third Avenue and 11th Street.
Using the city’s GPS data, Sense Networks, a SoHo software analytics firm, examined the pickup point of every New York City cab ride taken in the first six months of 2009. The result was a free mobile application called CabSense, which was released this week for iPhones and Android phones.
The program lets would-be taxi riders see a map of nearby street corners, ranked by the number of taxi hails they attract at that hour, on that day of the week. The company says it developed an algorithm to take into account parades, street construction and other factors that could skew the numbers.
“You always argue with your friends about it — I think you should stand on Sixth, I think you should stand on Seventh,” said Blake Shaw, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who oversaw the data analysis for CabSense. “To be able to say you’re 50 percent more likely to get a cab on Seventh, that’s unique.”
Over all, the No. 1 place to get a cab in the five boroughs, according to statistics compiled by Sense Networks for The New York Times, is Penn Station, one of the busiest train stations in the world. (The airports were not included in the data.)
Columbus Circle, with its popular shopping mall, its jumbo Whole Foods store and its entrance to Central Park, ranks second. Next are the Port Authority and Grand Central.
Less obvious spots also show up in the top 10, including Lexington Avenue at 86th Street (near an express subway stop) and Avenue of the Americas at 23rd (at the PATH train), along with the southeast corner of Central Park by the Apple Store and F. A. O. Schwarz.
Based on the statistics, the Upper East Side has a more cab-dependent culture than its neighbors across Central Park: more than two million trips started on the Upper East Side last May, nearly twice as many as on the Upper West Side.
On Tuesdays at 5 p.m., Lexington Avenue at 60th Street is the most common corner for cab hails after Penn Station.
But that poses a puzzle: Why is that corner far more popular than the corner just one block north, at 61st Street, which at that hour gets about one-third as many hails?
“It’s called Bloomingdale’s,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a traffic consultant. “Bloomingdale’s probably leads the pack of large-department-store customers who use taxis.”
And what about one block south, which also has a Bloomingdale’s exit but has fewer cab pickups? Mr. Schwartz, a former cabbie himself, pointed out that 59th Street, at that hour, “is a bear,” choked by motorists bound for the Queensborough Bridge.
“This is like the rats in the maze — they learn quickly how to get the food,” Mr. Schwartz said.
A neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown confirms what most New Yorkers already know: it is easier to get a cab below 96th Street in Manhattan, and much harder anywhere else.
Still, the numbers can be eye-opening.
Last May, in the entire month, about 554,000 yellow taxis picked up passengers in the East Village; in Inwood at the northern end of Manhattan, pickups numbered only 860, according to the data compiled by Sense Networks.
Taxis on the Upper West Side picked up nearly 90 times as many rides as cabs farther uptown in Washington Heights, which picked up about 14,000 rides during that month. “Oh wow,” Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, who represents Washington Heights, said when informed of those numbers. “You caught me by surprise. That’s very, very low. I thought it was higher than that.”
Muhammad Ayub, a cabbie for two years, said Friday that he preferred Penn Station and the Port Authority in the morning rush. Asked if he ever picks up rides in Washington Heights, Mr. Ayub grinned. “Where is that?” he asked with a smile.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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