Taxihack receives between 500 and 1,000 visits each day from New Yorkers seeking cars for hire. Its relaunch makes it easy to find nearby car services and reveals a heatmap of car demand based on a unique dataset.
Background
Taxihack won second prize in the first NYC BigApps competition in 2010.
The original concept was a mashup of Twitter and the public NYC taxi datasets. Users could get into a cab and tweet @taxihack with the taxi's medallion number or the driver's license number, and the service would post the tweet to a page about that taxi or driver.
Judges and the press loved the idea. The combination of New Yorkers, public commentary (mostly negative), and taxicabs was hard to resist. But in the end it was hard for users to remember to use the service regularly. So the focus changed to recommending local car services, where it stayed for a few years as user engagement grew.
Heatmap Data
Taxihack recieves between 500 and 1,000 visits each day from New Yorkers seeking cars for hire. Users often arrive from a search result, such as "far rockaway car services."
Much of the content on Taxihack is attached to a specific place, such as a car service, a taxi company, or a neighborhood. As users browse this content, we build the heatmap. Different pages & actions have different weights; in order this is how we weight our data:
- Clicking the "Find Cars Nearby" button: in this case we know exactly where a car seeker is located
- Car Company pages
- Neighborhood pages
- Zipcode pages
- Taxi Company pages
- Borough pages: very light weight
We gather up all the locations and weights from the last thirty minutes, and plot them on the map. This is an experiment, maybe it will provide good data to drivers or city officials.
Contact
Contact us here: support@taxihack.com