Yellow Taxi vs App Share by Taxi Zone

In short: Yellow taxis made 15.3% of all yellow, green and Uber/Lyft pickups in NYC over the 12 months to August 2026. Their share is high in only one area: Manhattan below Harlem, especially the Upper East Side, where yellow cabs made more than half of pickups in Central Park, Upper East Side North and Upper East Side South. They also hold a real share at JFK (31.4%) and LaGuardia (19.3%). In most of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, yellow cabs make under 5% of pickups.

The numbers at a glance

The share map

The dark area is small: Manhattan from Lower Manhattan up to the Upper East and Upper West Sides. The share drops sharply in Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood, and almost everywhere across the rivers. The TLC lookup table labels 55 Manhattan zones, roughly this area plus the harbor islands and Randalls Island, "Yellow Zone". There, yellow cabs made 33.4% of pickups. In the 205 zones labelled "Boro Zone" (the other boroughs plus 14 Manhattan zones, 13 of them in upper Manhattan and one on Roosevelt Island), they made 2.7%. See service zone for what these labels do and don't mean.

Top zones by yellow share

After the three zones above 50%, the next highest were Penn Station/Madison Sq West (49.4%), Lincoln Square East (45.8%) and Upper West Side South (45.0%). Midtown is in the middle: Midtown East 42.4% and Midtown Center 40.0%. Downtown and nightlife zones are lower: TriBeCa/Civic Center 19.3% and the Lower East Side 19.6%.

By count, not share

A high share and a high count are different things. The Upper East Side South zone had the most yellow pickups of any zone (2.06 million). The top app zones were LaGuardia (4.93 million) and JFK (3.99 million), then Crown Heights North and East New York in Brooklyn, zones where yellow cabs made about 2% of pickups (2.2% and 1.7%).

The airports

At JFK, yellow taxis made 1,828,649 pickups (31.4%) and apps 3,988,508. At LaGuardia, yellow taxis made 1,175,670 (19.3%) and apps 4,926,495. Yellow cabs pick up from the airport taxi lines, while app pickups happen at other designated spots. The rules are on the JFK and LaGuardia pages. Newark (zone 1) is in New Jersey and NYC vehicles mostly drop off there; it recorded only 6,404 pickups in the data, so it is not discussed here.

Outside Manhattan

East Elmhurst (14.1%), the zone next to LaGuardia on the TLC map, is far ahead of every other outer-borough zone. The rest of the list is in western Queens and north or downtown Brooklyn, the parts of those boroughs closest to Manhattan. The data shows where yellow cabs pick up; it doesn't show why. By borough, the yellow share was 30.4% in Manhattan, 6.9% in Queens (most of it at the airports), 2.3% in Brooklyn, 1.1% in the Bronx and 0.1% on Staten Island.

What the data can't tell you

• How the trip was booked. A yellow trip requested through an app still counts as yellow. Since mid-2026 many yellow trips carry an app company's code; see Uber trips sent to yellow taxis.
• Supply vs demand. A low yellow share can mean few riders want taxis there, or few taxis go there. Pickup counts can't separate the two.
• Non-app car services. Black car, livery and limo trips outside the apps are not counted, so "app share" here means Uber and Lyft only.
• Exact places. A zone is an area, and the period is one year (September 2025 – August 2026).

Zone rankings by borough: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Citywide counts: busiest pickup zones and NYC taxi and Uber trip statistics. Choosing what to drive? Read yellow taxi vs Uber. More on the places hub.