If you've ever wondered what a day in the life of one of New York City's ubiquitous yellow cabs looked like on a map, you're really in luck now. City Labs has discovered programmer Chris Whong's "civic technology project" that used data from every taxi trip in 2013 to visualize the routes of some 30 cabs/days. What Whong is trying to do is "analyze running counts of fares, taxes, etc., over the course of a day" and see how taxis move through the city.
The data Whong used included only the start and end location for each trip; the programmer then used a Google Directions API to process the information and provide the best route between the two points. That's to say what's depicted is not necessarily the route the cab took, but the route the computer found most effective. Watch as cabs rack up some $600 dollars in fares in a single day. An attentive viewing of the map also reveals trends in certain neighborhoods during certain times of day: for example, a few taxi routes show that the East Village gets more traffic at night, and some cabs make rather late night trips over to Williamsburg to drop off passengers. Guilty? More here.
· NYC Taxi [official]
· Follow a Real New York Taxi's Daily Slog [CL]
· This Amazing 'Day in the Life of a Taxi Driver' Interactive Map Shows NYC Cabbies Work Much Harder Than You [DI]
· Cool Map Thing archive [Curbed]