Suppose you have 10 taxis in Manhattan. What portion of the borough’s streets do they cover in a typical day?

Just 10 taxis typically cover one-third of Manhattan’s streets in a day.

Before answering that, it would be helpful to examine why it would be useful to know this fact. Cities have a lot of things that need measuring: air pollution, weather, traffic patterns, road quality, and more. Some of these can be measured by instruments attached to buildings. But researchers can also affix inexpensive sensors to taxis and capture measurements across a larger portion of a city.

So, how many taxis would it take to cover a certain amount of ground?

To find out, an MIT-based team of researchers analyzed traffic data from nine major cities on three continents and emerged with several new findings. A few taxis can cover a surprisingly large amount of ground, but it takes many more taxis to cover a city more comprehensively than that. Intriguingly, this pattern seems to replicate itself in metro areas around the world.

More specifically: Just 10 taxis typically cover one-third of Manhattan’s streets in a day. It also takes about 30 taxis to cover half of Manhattan in a day. But because taxis tend to have convergent routes, over 1,000 taxis are required in order to cover 85 percent of Manhattan in a day.

“The sensing power of taxis is unexpectedly large,” says Kevin O’Keeffe, a postdoc at the MIT Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results.

However, O’Keeffe observes, “There is a law of diminishing returns” at play as well. “You get the first one-third of streets almost free, with 10 random taxis. But … then it gets progressively harder.”

A similar numerical relationship occurs in Chicago, San Francisco, Vienna, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, and some other major global cities.

Members of the Senseable City Lab have long been studying cities based on data from sensors. In doing so, they have observed that some traditional deployments of sensors come with tradeoffs. Sensors on buildings, for example, can provide consistent daily data, but their reach is very limited. Fixed-location sensors are good in time, but not space. Airborne sensors have inverse properties. They’re good in space but not time. A satellite can take a photo of an entire city — but only when it is passing over the city, which is a relatively short time interval. The researchers sought to find something that combines the strengths of the two approaches, that explores a city well in both space and time.

Putting sensors on vehicles is one solution. But which vehicles? Buses have fixed routes, and cover limited ground. Members of the Senseable City Lab have affixed sensors to garbage trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other things, but even so, they did not collect as much data as taxis might.

That research helped lead to the current study, which uses data from a variety of municipalities and private-sector research efforts to better understand taxi-coverage patterns. The first place the researchers studied was Manhattan, which they divided into about 8,000 street segments, and obtained their initial results.

Still, Manhattan has some distinct features — an unusually regular street grid, for example — and there was no guarantee the metrics it produced would be similar in other places. But in city after city, the same phenomenon emerged: a small number of taxis can circulate over one-third of a city in a day, and a slightly larger number can reach half the city. However, after that, a much bigger fleet is needed.

The practical side of the study is that city planners and policymakers, among others, now potentially have a more concrete idea about the investment needed for certain levels of mobile sensing, as well as the extent of the results they would likely obtain. An air pollution study, for instance, could be drawn up with this kind of data in mind.

One practical way to construct a mobile-sensing project might be to place sensors on taxis, then deploy a relatively small fleet of vehicles (as Google does for mapping projects) to reach streets where taxis virtually never venture. This is biased, almost by definition, in favor of popular areas, and you’re potentially underserving deprived areas. The way to get around that is with a hybrid approach— put sensors on taxis, then augment it with a few dedicated vehicles.

For more information, contact Abby Abazorius at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..