// 264 ZONES · 168 MONTHS · 2.76B TRIPS

Every NYC taxi trip, sorted by what happened to the block it started on.

We processed the entire TLC public archive — yellow + green + FHV + HVFHS, January 2011 through December 2024 — and sorted all 264 zones into six categories based purely on their own time series. No curated “interesting zones.” Just the data.

958×

— Growth at Far Rockaway

43.9 trips/month in 2011 → 42,053 trips/month today. And 11 more emergent zones just like it.

Trips scanned

2.76B

Months

168

TLC zones

264

Burla wall-clock

15s

Serial-equiv

~45min

Peak workers

168

Three unexpected patterns

A city moving, unevenly.

LOC_ID 043

Ghost zone

40%

Central Park, still alive — just not in a yellow cab

219,763 trips/mo in May 2011 → 86,952/mo today. Classic Manhattan yellow-cab cannibalization: the neighborhood never emptied, the yellow-cab line did.

LOC_ID 035

Emergent zone

769×

Brownsville, a second taxi system

156 trips/mo at birth → 120,262 recent. All twelve top-emergent zones are outer-borough. Ride-share literally built a taxi system where yellow cabs refused to go.

LOC_ID 138

Resurrected

82%

LaGuardia Airport, fully recovered

From 609K trips/mo peak → 10,717 in April 2020 → 502,846 today. Airports are back. Midtown (64–66% back) isn't. That's remote work in one number.

Open the full 264-zone report

Source: NYC TLC public trip-record archive (tlc.nyc.gov) · yellow + green + FHV + HVFHS monthly parquet · ~50 GB of compressed columnar data.

Orchestration: Burla's remote_parallel_map. One task per (taxi_type, year, month) → 371 tasks in parallel → every task runs pyarrow streaming straight off CloudFront, groups by PULocationID, returns a tiny dict. The whole fan-out finishes before a single-threaded laptop has finished downloading one month.

Source code: github.com/Burla-Cloud/nyc-ghost-neighborhoods