NYC taxi data desk · Counted from TLC records · Reviewed 2026-10-24
Where New York's taxis are, and when, from the city's own trip records.
How many people see a taxi ad in NYC?
No public dataset counts the people who see a New York taxi ad. What the city's records count is cabs and trips: 8,494 yellow taxis on the road per day (TLC monthly indicators, July 2026) and 107,636 metered trips per day (TLC trip records, August 2026). Any "people per day" figure in circulation is an estimate, not a measurement.
A cab is a vehicle, a trip is one ride, and neither is a person who saw the roof. In August 2026 the TLC trip records hold 3,336,701 metered trips for the whole month, 107,636 a day, and 86.8% of them started in Manhattan; the busiest moment is 6 p.m. on a weekday, with 2,285 cabs carrying a passenger at once. The method, the script and the file checksum are on the fleet and trip data page.
8,494 yellow taxis on the road per day Vehicles, not people · NYC TLC monthly indicators, July 2026
107,636 metered trips per day Rides, not cabs and not viewers · TLC trip records, August 2026
3,336,701 metered trips in the month All of August 2026, not one day · TLC trip records
Brands photographed on New York streets · 2021 to 2026
Alien: Earth (FX on Hulu) / Best Buy / Betterment / Bumble and bumble / JPMorganChase / Citizens / Diet Coke / Discover / Estée Lauder / FIFA Club World Cup 2025 / Gilead / Gran Turismo / Heineken / Lancôme / LEGO / LEGO 2K Drive / LinkedIn / Inside Out 2 / Madewell / Marc Jacobs / New York Mets / MongoDB / Nike / Northwell Health / Okta / Oura / RE/MAX / Biossance / ShipBob / Shopify / Snapchat / Solana / Starbucks / StreetEasy / Stripe / Swarovski / The Economist / Touchland / Uber Eats with Sephora / UGG / US Open / Victoria's Secret / Wicked on Broadway / Workday / Workiva / Yves Saint Laurent
When and where are New York's taxis on the street?
3,336,701 metered trips in the month of August 2026, 107,636 a day, read from the TLC's own file: no sample and no model.
Swarovski · Full wrap swarm with static tops · Fifth Avenue · 2024
| Reading | Figure, August 2026 | What it means for a roof unit |
|---|---|---|
| Busiest hour on a weekday | 6 p.m.: 2,285 cabs carrying a passenger at once | Against 130 at 3 a.m., the quietest hour. A roof unit is on the street empty too, so these are floors. |
| Weekend nights | 1,838 occupied cabs at midnight, against 738 on a weekday | Saturday and Sunday after dark are a different street from Monday to Friday. |
| Trips that start or end in Manhattan | 93.3% | 76.5% carried the Congestion Relief Zone fee, the MTA charge for Manhattan below 60th Street. |
| Trips that start or end at an airport | 9.1% | JFK alone is the busiest pickup zone in the city, 4,922 a day; LaGuardia 2,835. |
| Ten busiest pickup zones | 33.4% of all trips | Out of 259 zones with at least one pickup. Midtown Center, Upper East Side South and Penn Station follow JFK. |
Source: NYC TLC Yellow Taxi Trip Records, August 2026 file, read 2026-10-24; zones from the TLC taxi zone lookup. The hour-by-hour table, the borough split, the busiest pickup zones and the method are on the fleet and trip data page, next to the three fleet counts.
What are the benefits of taxi advertising in NYC, by the record?
By the TLC record, a yellow-taxi buy is a Manhattan and airport buy: 93.3% of August 2026 trips started or ended in Manhattan and 9.1% at JFK, LaGuardia or Newark, with 6 p.m. on weekdays the busiest hour. Its thin spots are as clear: the Bronx took 0.5% of pickups, Staten Island 362 pickups all month, and at most 0.92% of trips ended outside the city.
| Reading | Figure | For a buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Where the record is strong | ||
| Manhattan | 93.3% of trips start or end there; 79.1% stay inside it | More than nine in ten metered trips put the roof unit on a Manhattan street at the start or the end. |
| Airports | 9.1% of trips; JFK 4,922 pickups a day, LaGuardia 2,835 | JFK is the busiest single pickup zone in the city. The airport hours are on the fleet data page. |
| Weekday evening | 2,285 cabs carrying a passenger at once at 6 p.m. | The busiest hour of the week for occupied cabs; empty cabs cruising for a hail add to it. |
| Weekend nights | 1,838 occupied cabs at midnight on a weekend day, against 738 on a weekday | East Village leads the zone table on Friday and Saturday nights, 748 trips starting or ending there an hour. |
| Concentration | 33.4% of trips start in ten of 259 pickup zones | Ten zones hold a third of all pickups, which is what makes geofencing worth asking about. |
| Time in the back seat | Median metered trip 14.35 minutes | The dwell a Taxi TV screen gets, computed from the same file; the passenger can mute or switch it off. |
| Where it is thin | ||
| The Bronx | 0.5% of pickups, 1.1% of drop-offs | A yellow cab reaches very little of the borough. |
| Staten Island | 362 pickups and 1,760 drop-offs in the whole month | Close to none. |
| Outside the city | At most 0.92% of trips end outside NYC, in an unknown zone or at Newark | New Jersey, Long Island and Westchester are a different buy. |
| Weekday small hours | 130 occupied cabs at 3 a.m. | The quietest hour of a weekday for occupied cabs. |
| Hours a cab works | 8.1 hours a day, 26.2 days a month (July 2026) | A roof unit is on the street when its cab is, not around the clock. |
Trip figures: TLC Yellow Taxi Trip Records, August 2026, counted on this desk; hours and days per cab: NYC TLC monthly indicators, July 2026. The trip file carries no rider age, income or origin, so it cannot say who is in the cab. The nearest it comes is where trips start: 4,922 pickups a day at JFK, 4,409 in Midtown Center, 3,758 at Penn Station and Madison Square West and 3,121 in Times Square and the Theatre District. For scale, NYC Tourism + Conventions counted 65 million visitors to the city in 2025 (release of March 24, 2026); the trip file cannot say how many of them took a yellow cab, so this desk does not put the two numbers into one.
What is published about taxi ads, against the record
| Published claim | Publisher, page | What the TLC record says |
|---|---|---|
| "13,000+ yellow cabs and green borough taxis active daily in NYC" | NY Taxi Ads, FAQ page | 8,494 yellow and 287 green taxis on the road per day (NYC TLC monthly indicators, July 2026). 13,589 is the medallion count, licences rather than cabs on the street (NYC TLC 2025 Annual Report). |
| "taxi ads move around all five boroughs" | NY Taxi Ads, benefits post dated July 27, 2026 | 86.8% of pickups in Manhattan, 0.5% in the Bronx, 362 on Staten Island all month (TLC trip records, August 2026). |
| "24/7 Visibility" | AdQuick, taxi advertising page marked updated October 2026 | A yellow cab works 8.1 hours a day on average (NYC TLC monthly indicators, July 2026). On a weekday 130 cabs carry a passenger at 3 a.m. against 2,285 at 6 p.m. (August 2026). |
| A single taxi "in a market like New York": "over 100,000 impressions per month" | AdQuick, same page, FAQ | No TLC file counts impressions, and the page gives no method for the figure. |
| "10,900 (approx.)" impressions per taxi per day | Blue Line Media, NYC Taxi Ads page | No method is given. The page also puts the fleet at 11,000 (approx.) taxis, against 10,216 medallion vehicles in the TLC licensing file (2026-10-23). |
| "over 1 million impressions daily" in New York City | Park(ing) Day, article dated November 12, 2025, citing an unnamed study | The study is not named. TLC files count cabs (8,494 a day) and trips (107,636 a day), not viewers. |
| "average ride durations of 10 to 30 minutes" | AdQuick, taxi advertising page | Median metered trip 14.35 minutes (TLC trip records, August 2026); average 17.2 minutes (NYC TLC monthly indicators, July 2026). |
Every claim was read on the publisher's live page on 2026-10-24 and is quoted, not paraphrased. None of those pages names a method for its impression figure. The fleet counts behind the right-hand column, and the vendor fleet figures set against them, are on the fleet and trip data page.
Which taxi ad formats can you buy in New York?
The roof, the passenger screen and the vehicle body reach different people. Vendors sell all three under the word taxi.
LinkedIn · 360 wrap swarm with digital tops · Tenth Avenue, Chelsea · 2025
-
Digital taxi top
A double-sided LED screen on the roof. Creative can change by hour and by where the cab is.
Watch for: Ask for share of voice in the rotation, not only for the number of cabs carrying a screen.
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Static taxi top
The printed roof box New York has used for decades. One message, day and night.
Watch for: The steadiest way to hold one message across the city. It cannot be changed once it is up.
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Taxi TV
The passenger screen inside the cab, sold as spots against the fleet rather than per cab.
Watch for: A different audience: the rider already in the car, not the street.
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Full and 360 wrap
Vinyl across the body. In New York this runs on for-hire, rideshare and branded fleet vehicles, not on yellow medallion cabs.
Watch for: 35 RCNY 58-32(c): no exterior advertising on a yellow taxi unless the Commission authorizes it. Ask which vehicles the wrap is on.
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Digital swarm
A group of digital tops routed through one area at once, so a street reads as saturated.
Watch for: Ask how the zone is drawn, how dwell is measured, and what happens when a cab leaves it.
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Specials
Hologram units, LED trucks, glass trucks, pedicabs, food trucks. Event inventory, not always-on media.
Watch for: The longest lead times on this list. Bring dates before creative.
The passenger screen belongs to the cab's technology provider, CMT or Curb in almost every trip record. The roof-unit operators, what each controls and where their own published figures disagree are on the companies roster, ordered by a written rule, and what Taxi TV is sets the passenger screen beside the roof. Each format is photographed in the campaign archive. Published prices, every row with its publisher and read date, are on the rate-card reconciliation.
What do NYC taxi campaigns look like on the street?
Frames shot on New York streets while the campaigns ran. Brand, format and location were each read off the photograph.
Snapchat · 360 wrap with digital top · Times Square · 2024
Documented campaigns · every frame below is from an operator's archive, used with permission; every caption checked against the frame
12 frames · 11 brands · brand, format and location verified against the photograph
Photographed on a New York street during the campaign; frame supplied by the taxi-top operator that ran it, reproduced with its permission.
How do you check the arithmetic in a taxi proposal?
Enter the cab count, the days and the seller's own impressions figure. Nothing here is a measurement; the model only makes a proposal's arithmetic visible.
Workday · Digital top · 34 St–Hudson Yards station · 2025
Frequently asked questions
- How many people see a taxi ad in NYC?
- No public dataset counts them. The TLC counts vehicles and rides: 8,494 yellow taxis on the road per day in July 2026 (NYC TLC monthly indicators) and 107,636 metered trips per day in August 2026 (TLC trip records). A cab is not a trip and a trip is not a viewer, so neither number is an audience. Vendor impression figures, such as the 10,900 (approx.) per taxi per day on Blue Line Media's New York page (read 2026-10-24), are published without a method.
- Where does the NYC taxi data on this site come from?
- From the Taxi and Limousine Commission's own files. Trips by hour and place come from the TLC Yellow Taxi Trip Records for August 2026, analysed here with a published script. The on-road count comes from the TLC monthly indicators (July 2026), the vehicle count from the TLC licensing file on NYC Open Data (dataset rhe8-mgbb, 2026-10-23), and the medallion count from the TLC 2025 annual report.
- Which taxi advertising formats are allowed on a New York yellow cab?
- The TLC rulebook sets out two. A Rooftop Advertising Fixture on the roof, which a medallion owner may install after paying an annual advertising permit fee (35 RCNY 67-16), and advertising on the Passenger Information Monitor inside, which the cab's technology provider may run (35 RCNY 75-25(d)(2)(iv)). Any other exterior advertising on a yellow cab needs the Commission's authorization (58-32(c)), so a body wrap is not a standard yellow-cab format, and a for-hire vehicle such as an Uber or Lyft car may not carry roof advertising (59A-29(e)(2)); the one for-hire exception is the green Street Hail Livery (59B-29(e)(2)).
- How often are the numbers on this desk refreshed?
- Before a page is republished. The TLC posts each month of trip records about two months after it ends; the analysis is rerun on the newest file and the month is printed next to every figure. The monthly indicators and the licensing file are re-read on the date shown. A number that cannot be re-read against its source is taken down rather than carried forward.
- Can I cite or reuse the figures?
- Yes, with a link to the page and the month the figure describes. The trip-record figures can be rebuilt from the public TLC file: the script, the file name and its checksum are listed in the method notes on the fleet and trip data page, so a reader can reach the same counts without taking this desk's word for them.
- Does this desk sell taxi advertising?
- No. It publishes counts, rules and third-party rate cards. The editor works at Firefly, a taxi-top operator listed on the companies roster, and a brief sent through the form on this page can reach Firefly's sales team, as the footer and the privacy notice say. No price on this desk comes from Firefly or any other operator.
Send a brief
Dates and the audience are enough to start. The reply says whether a taxi format fits, including when it does not.
Stripe · Digital top · Javits Center · 2025