Transportation
What Taxis Add to Public Transit
Cabs don't have to compete with buses and subways - they can complement them.
Last week David King, an urban planning professor at Columbia, posted to his blog a video that charts the origins and destinations of yellow cabs in New York City over a 24-hour period. The video, King explains by email, was made under his direction by graduate student Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, who animated a representative sample of 200,000 taxi trips. Think of it as the statistical equivalent to a New York City time-lapse. If that guy who narrates movie previews were here, he might begin, In a world where yellow cabs have mysteriously become red and blue dots… :