New York is a city of 8 million people, and 52,131 of them are cab drivers. Who are these cabbies? What are their lives like? What are their names? Well, we can’t answer those first two questions, but someone went and looked at the public data on NYC cab drivers and at least got an answer for that third question. As it turns out, the most common name registered to a cabbie with a medallion number in New York is some variation of the name Mohammed.
Data minder Seth Kadish over at Visual Statistix decided to dig into the list of active medallion taxi drivers that the city keeps, and came up with a couple of nifty charts detailing the most common first name and most common last name of taxi drivers around here. The five most common names Kadish found were Md, Mohammad, Mohammed, Muhammad, and Mohamed. Does this mean that your friend isn’t being racist when he calls his cabbie Mohammad in a fit of rage? Well, probably not, your friend is a terrible person we’ve been meaning to tell you to drop him.
Kadish also determined that the five most common last names for active cabbies were Singh, Rahman, Islam, Ahmed and Khan. Singh wins in a landslide though, with almost 600 instances of the name per 10,000 cabbies, compared to 200 instances per 10,000 for the next highest last name, Be sure to check out the whole chart for the rest of the names, and a detailed pairing up of the most common first and last names, because what else are you gonna do on a Tuesday? Work?