Borough-to-Borough Trip Flows: Where NYC Rides Go

In short: Most NYC rides stay close to home. Of about 298 million yellow taxi, green cab and Uber/Lyft trips from September 2025 to August 2026, 71.6% ended in the same borough where they started. Staten Island keeps the most (86.0% of its pickups stay on the island). The Bronx sends the biggest share to Manhattan (15.7%), and Manhattan sends 7.0% of its trips to Brooklyn. These figures are TLC Help's count from TLC's trip record files, using the borough of each trip's pickup and drop-off zone.

JFK and LaGuardia have their own rows and columns below because they behave so differently from the rest of Queens.

The numbers at a glance

The origin–destination table (all industries)

Read across a row to see where trips from that place went.

A few things to notice:

• Manhattan pickups: 75.1% stay in Manhattan, 7.0% go to Brooklyn, 4.4% to the Bronx, 3.6% to the rest of Queens, 2.7% to LaGuardia, 1.7% to JFK and 1.2% to Newark. Another 4.2% end outside NYC or at an unknown location.
• Brooklyn pickups: 76.3% stay, 10.9% go to Manhattan and 7.2% to Queens.
• Queens (not counting the airports): 70.3% stay, 10.2% go to Brooklyn and 8.5% to Manhattan.
• Bronx: 73.8% stay, 15.7% go to Manhattan, and 5.7% end outside NYC or unknown, the highest of any borough.
• Staten Island: 86.0% stay; Brooklyn (6.8%) is the main destination off the island.

The other airport question, how many trips go to an airport, is in the columns: Manhattan sent 7.26 million trips to JFK, LaGuardia and Newark combined, Brooklyn 2.56 million and Queens 2.40 million.

By industry

Uber and Lyft are most of the total, so their table looks like the one above:

Yellow taxis are different. They pick up almost only in Manhattan and at the airports, and their outer-borough trips mostly head into Manhattan:

Green cabs made far fewer trips. Most start in upper Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn:

Share staying in the borough

For yellow taxis, 92.8% of Manhattan pickups end in Manhattan, but only 49.0% of Brooklyn pickups stay in Brooklyn; 36.5% go to Manhattan. Bronx yellow pickups (357,585 in the year) go to Manhattan more often (49.0%) than they stay (33.4%).

Return trips: how flows balance

A driver who ends a trip far from where demand is has to drive back empty or find a new fare. The citywide numbers show how one-sided some flows are:

App flows are close to balanced. App drivers can get requests in any borough, while yellow taxis get most of their fares in Manhattan and at the airports. Yellow taxi flows are not: for every 100 yellow trips from Manhattan to Brooklyn, only 51 came back. These are totals for the whole city over a year. They are not the odds of any one driver getting a return fare.

A yellow cab driver can't refuse a passenger going to any destination in NYC, Westchester, Nassau or Newark Airport (rule §80-20(a)(1)), and can't ask the destination before the passenger is seated (rule 80-20(a)(4)) (TLC rules, chapter 80). So the long trip out is part of the job; the data just show what the trip back usually looks like.

What the data can't tell you

• Empty miles. Trip records only cover time with a passenger, so we can't see how far drivers drove empty to get home or to the next fare.
• Whether a driver got a fare back. Records don't link one driver's trips together in public data.
• Exact places outside NYC. Zone 265 lumps together all trips that end outside the city.
• Black car and livery trips outside Uber and Lyft are not included.
• Small cells. Green cab and Staten Island yellow counts are small; don't read patterns into a few hundred trips.

How we counted

We counted every trip that started between September 1, 2025 and August 31, 2026 in TLC's yellow, green and high-volume FHV files, dropping taxi rows with negative fares (reversals), and grouped pickup and drop-off zones by borough with TLC's zone lookup table. JFK (132), LaGuardia (138) and Newark (1) are shown separately; "Queens" means the other 67 Queens zones. Totals match our borough datasets (trips-pickups-by-borough, trips-dropoffs-by-borough), apart from trips whose pickup zone was unknown.

Zone by zone, the busiest single routes are short hops inside one borough:

See also NYC taxi and Uber trip statistics, busiest pickup zones, busiest drop-off zones, Uber/Lyft trips by borough, relief stand gap by borough, taxi stands by borough and who can pick up where. More on the places hub.