Taxi Hails Plummet On Upper East Side After Second Avenue Subway Opens, Study Shows

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The arrival of the Second Avenue Subway has been a blessing for Upper East Siders, but a nightmare for cab drivers. A new study from the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation shows taxi pickups and drop-offs have plummeted in the neighborhood since it opened in January.

Some sections of the Upper East Side saw nearly a 20 percent drop in the number of taxi pickups in January 2017 compared to January 2016, according to NYU researcher Sarah M Kaufman. Traditionally the Upper East Side was a rich market for cabs.

With the "unique combination of higher median incomes and inadequate subway service," the neighborhood's commuters had a high reliance on taxis, Kaufman told Patch. In the eastern part of Lenox Hill, 9 percent of residents said they commuted to work by taxi in a 2015 American Community Survey. The same survey showed that in the eastern part of Yorkville, which used to boast the furthest walking distance from a subway line in Manhattan, 7.3 percent of residents commuted by taxi. Those numbers were much higher than the Manhattan average of 2.9 percent.

Here's a detailed chart depicting drops in neighborhood taxi pickups:

The decline in taxi ridership may not be solely attributable to the launch of the Second Avenue Subway, Kaufman told Patch. The rise of ride hailing services such as Uber also attributed.

"We have seen a rise in ridership in for-hire vehicles like Uber, Lyft and Via," Kaufman told Patch. "We do not have data for those services, so we do not know how much of the ridership switched from taxis to for-hire to as opposed to the Second Avenue Subway, but we assume the majority went to the Second Avenue Subway.

Photo courtesy of Governor Andrew Cuomo