Busiest Pickup Zones in NYC for Taxis and Uber/Lyft

In short: From September 2025 to August 2026, LaGuardia Airport was NYC's busiest pickup zone for Uber and Lyft with 4,926,495 app pickups, followed by JFK (3,988,508). The busiest non-airport app zones were in Brooklyn: Crown Heights North and East New York. Yellow taxis are a different map: their top zone was Upper East Side South (2,064,723 pickups), and 23 of their top 25 zones are in Manhattan.

All counts are from TLC trip records for those 12 months, the latest TLC had published on October 12, 2026. "App" means high-volume for-hire services (Uber and Lyft).

The numbers at a glance

Pickups are spread wide. The 10 busiest zones had 14.5% of all pickups, the top 50 had 48.5%, and the top 100 had 73.5% (our arithmetic from dataset trips-zone-index). So more than a quarter of all trips start outside the 100 busiest zones.

Where Uber and Lyft pick up most

Outer-borough zones in the app top 10

Three of the top 10 app zones are Brooklyn neighborhoods: Crown Heights North (3rd), East New York (4th) and Bushwick South (8th, 2,817,768). The two airports in Queens are 1st and 2nd. The other five are Manhattan: Times Sq/Theatre District, East Village, Midtown Center, TriBeCa/Civic Center and West Chelsea/Hudson Yards. In the app top 25, Manhattan has 13 zones, Brooklyn 7 and Queens 5.

Where yellow taxis pick up most

Yellow cabs still depend on the core of Manhattan and the airports: 39.5 million of their 45.6 million pickups in these 12 months were in Manhattan (dataset trips-pickups-by-borough). Green cabs, which may not take hails south of East 96th and West 110th Streets, have their own pattern. See where green cabs get hails.

Top 25 zones per industry

Airport zones

The airports are the only places where one zone has millions of pickups for both yellow and app trips. Over the 12 months, JFK had 1,828,649 yellow and 3,988,508 app pickups, and LaGuardia 1,175,670 yellow and 4,926,495 app pickups (dataset trips-zone-index). At the airports, pickups depend on airport rules more than on driving around. FHV drivers may not accept a dispatch while parked at JFK or LaGuardia unless parked somewhere other than the designated passenger pickup locations ($250, TLC rule §80-19(f)). See can Uber drivers wait at JFK or LaGuardia? and the LaGuardia page.

Which zones grew and which shrank

To compare years, we used TLC's own monthly zone counts on NYC Open Data (c5iv-bn4s), which go back to 2019. Their totals differ by small amounts from our trip-record totals because the trip files are cleaned and revised differently.

Every one of the eight fastest-growing big zones is outside Manhattan: Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Seven of the eight biggest fallers are in Manhattan, plus JFK. That matches TLC's February 2026 report, which found app trips growing in every borough except Manhattan (see the borough data). Overall, app pickups rose 5.0% between the two periods and yellow pickups were flat (+0.1%) in the same TLC counts.

What the data can't tell you

• How many drivers were waiting. A busy zone can also be crowded with cars. Pickups are not requests, and they say nothing about your wait.
• Earnings. Pickup counts don't show pay. Zone pages show median app driver pay per trip, which excludes tips and tolls and is not hourly pay.
• Exact streets. A zone can cover dozens of blocks.
• Black car, livery and limo trips that don't go through Uber or Lyft. They are not in these counts.
• Why a zone grew. The data show the change, not the cause.

Next: see the other side of the trip in busiest drop-off zones, or rank zones within a borough: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island. More on the places hub.