The Most Common Taxi and Uber Routes in NYC (Trip Data)

In short: The most common trip in New York City is a short hop on the Upper East Side: Upper East Side South to Upper East Side North, 414,665 times in 12 months, and the reverse 378,964 times. Most of the top 20 routes are like that: short trips between neighboring zones, about 1 to 1.6 miles. The only airport route in the top 20 is LaGuardia ↔ Times Square. (The ranking counts trips between two NYC zones; trips that leave the city are covered below.) Yellow taxis dominate the Upper East Side routes; Uber and Lyft make almost all of the Brooklyn and Queens ones. Data: TLC trip records, September 2025 – August 2026.

The numbers at a glance

The top 20 routes

What the list shows

Neighbors, not long rides. 15 of the 20 routes join two zones that share a border on TLC's zone map. Bushwick North ↔ Bushwick South, Williamsburg (North Side) ↔ Greenpoint, Astoria ↔ Steinway, Jamaica ↔ South Jamaica and Central Harlem ↔ Central Harlem North all appear in both directions. Their median distance is about 1 to 1.5 miles. The shortest is Williamsburg (North Side) → Williamsburg (South Side), at a median of 0.95 miles. The data does not record why people take these trips.

One airport pair. LaGuardia → Times Sq/Theatre District (296,510 trips, median 9.4 miles) is third, and the return trip (262,733, 10.4 miles) is sixth. Yellow cabs made 23.3% of the trips from LaGuardia to Times Square and 15.6% of the trips back. No JFK-to-NYC-zone route makes the top 20. Trips from JFK are spread thin: the single biggest NYC destination, Times Sq/Theatre District, got only 3.1% of them, and 15.3% left NYC (zone-132-top-destinations).

Trips that leave the city are not ranked. TLC codes every drop-off outside New York City as one zone, 265 ("Outside of NYC"), whether it is Long Island, Westchester or New Jersey. That code is not a place, so the list leaves it out. If it were counted, JFK → outside NYC (890,885 trips) and LaGuardia → outside NYC (677,151) would be the two largest pairs, ahead of the Upper East Side routes, and Times Sq/Theatre District → outside NYC (307,480) would also make the list. Newark Airport is its own zone and is not part of zone 265. See where airport trips start and airport pickups by hour.

Taxi routes vs app routes. Yellow cabs made 72.3% of trips on the #1 route and 67.9% on #2. On the Brooklyn and Queens routes, apps made 98% to 99%. The two Central Harlem routes are in between, with yellow cabs at about 5–7% and green cabs at about 1%.

No Bronx or Staten Island pair. All 20 routes are in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

Top 10 routes by type of vehicle

The yellow taxi list is a Manhattan triangle: the Upper East Side, Midtown and the Upper West Side. The app list is mostly short trips inside Brooklyn and Queens, plus the LaGuardia pair. The green cab list is very different: 8 of its top 10 routes start in East Harlem North and the other 2 in East Harlem South, and the busiest is East Harlem North → East Harlem South (21,655 trips). Green cabs may take street hails only outside Manhattan south of East 96th and West 110th Streets, which fits with routes that start uptown; see who can pick up where.

Data caveats

• Period: trips that started from September 2025 to August 2026, in TLC's published records. TLC can revise files.
• Coverage: yellow taxis, green cabs and high-volume app services (Uber, Lyft). Non-app black car, livery and limo trips are not included.
• Zones, not addresses: a "route" is a pair of taxi zones. Two trips on the same route can start and end on different blocks.
• Same-zone trips (7.5% of all trips) are left out, so very short trips inside one zone don't show here.
• Outside-NYC trips (zone 265) and unknown zones (264) are left out of the ranking; see above.

What the data can't tell you

It can't tell you what a route paid per hour, how long you waited for the next trip, or which streets drivers used. A common route is not proof of good earnings. For timing and pay, see busiest hours for Uber and Lyft and Uber/Lyft pay by hour of day. For whole-city totals, see NYC taxi and Uber trip statistics. Zone-by-zone rankings: Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. More on the places hub.