About
A data desk for New York taxi advertising.
The desk does one job: it counts. How many cabs are working, when and where they carry passengers, what the rulebook allows on them, and what each published rate card actually says, set beside the city's own files.
The name
NY Taxi Advertising, also published as the NYC Taxi Data Desk, is not affiliated with NY Taxi Ads (nytaxiads.com), a taxi-top operator listed on the companies roster. The two names are close; the desk sells nothing, and NY Taxi Ads runs taxi-top hardware.
Who edits it
Melih Koray edits every page on this desk. He works in out-of-home advertising in New York, a relationship set out in the footer of each page, and he builds the counts here from the Taxi and Limousine Commission's own files rather than from vendor decks. A figure without a named source and a date does not run, and no operator's rate card is reproduced.
One person writes, checks and publishes every page: Melih Koray. Each page carries its own review date in the footer, and that date moves only when the page's figures have been read again at the source and the page changed. No pen names, no research institute, no panel of experts stands behind any number here.
How figures are sourced
- Fleet counts come from the Taxi and Limousine Commission: the licensing file on NYC Open Data (dataset rhe8-mgbb), the monthly indicators and the annual report, each with its date.
- Trip figures are the desk's own count of the TLC trip record file for August 2026, 3,336,701 rows, tallied with a short script whose method, file name and checksum are printed on the fleet and trip data page. Every trip figure is computed twice, by two independent scripts, and published only when both agree.
- The zone-by-hour table behind the neighbourhood figures is a free download on that page, under CC BY 4.0.
- Rate figures are copied as their publisher printed them, publisher and read date on every row. Two publishers that disagree both stay in the table.
- A number that cannot be traced to a named source and a date is left out.
What it refuses to publish
- Round numbers with nobody behind them, such as impressions per cab with no method.
- An operator's own price. No rate, CPM or minimum on the desk comes from Firefly or any other operator.
- Stock or generated pictures of cabs. Each photograph shows a campaign on a real street.
- Anything for drivers. The readers are buyers and planners.
Commercial relationships
Melih Koray publishes and edits this desk, and he is employed by Firefly, a New York taxi-top operator that appears on the companies roster here. Firefly supplied the campaign photographs, and a brief sent through the form can reach Firefly's sales team. No page here links to Firefly, and no rate on this site comes from Firefly.
The brief form on the home page asks for dates and an audience. The privacy notice lists every field, says who reads a brief and explains how to have one removed.
Where the photographs come from
Firefly supplied the 51 street photographs, covering 46 brands, from the record it keeps of its own New York campaigns. Before a frame went up, its brand, format, place and year were checked against what the picture shows, and frames that could not be confirmed that way were dropped. The gallery credit reads: Photographed on a New York street during the campaign; frame supplied by the taxi-top operator that ran it, reproduced with its permission.