In this short guide I would like to share information about how Taxis operate in Cities Skylines. There's not a ton of documentation about cabs so I thought I'd gather my findings here.

Let me start with some quotes from CO and the Skylines Wiki.

"The taxi service is a new service that allows tourists and citizens to order taxis to take them to their destination. Basically taxis work a lot like private cars, but with difference of taxis residing in a depot and using stands to wait for new customers. Taxis especially help tourists to get around the city easier and thus make them stay longer in the city, generating more tax income."

The taxi service allows tourists and citizens to order taxis to take them to their destination. Taxis do not use lines, they receive requests from tourists and citizens and travel automatically to pick the customers up. If a taxi does not have a new customer in line, it will go to the nearest taxi stand to wait for a call if there’s still work shift left.

Taxis are important for the Commercial specialization districts. Tourists visiting tourism districts and citizens in leisure districts will both make use of a good taxi system.[4]

That's about where the official info stops, and my findings begin. Some of this is a bit speculative and/or subjective, I am not a programmer who can look under the hood, but I will start with what I think is true for 1.2.2 AD gameplay.



One default taxi will only ever carry one passenger at a time. Each taxi goes through a work shift consisting of transporting 10 passengers. Any shift can be interrupted at any time when there's no more passengers to pick up.



Whenever a taxi becomes 'available' it will return to the nearest taxi stand. When there's no stands nearby each cab will return to their depot. Taxis are owned by one depot, and cannot return to another.

If there's enough demand for cabs, each depot will start spawning every available taxi. Plopping too many depots at once in one location without other taxis already driving will cause what I'd call a Taxiwave. Taxiwaves can and will cause congestion because each vehicle isn't scheduled like a bus or train to wait for the last one on a line to leave.



If you do not have any despawn mods activated cabs can have extremely long shifts. A taxi can wait for customers indefinitely, it could technically be sitting at a stand and never have its shift ended.

Taxis seem to be linked to the day/night cycle, picking up more passengers during the night than during the day*. A lot of tourists seem to call for them at night.
* Please confirm / unconfirm if this is true, I'm using too many mods to judge reliably



Each cab will be assigned one passenger at a time. Passengers cannot be pickup up by other taxis once they are responded to. This means other cabs will gladly ignore potential customers who are waiting for a ride.

Depots will spawn more cabs if you increase the Taxi budget. Increasing the budget to 150% results in a 25% increase in capacity. If you have 100 cabs available, you can increase that to 125 for every depot. It's more cost efficient to build more depots, and to adjust the ratio for night time vs daytime.



One default depot spawns up to 25 cabs (31 @150%), my large one spawns up to 50 (63 @150%). One stand can hold 5 vehicles. Getting a nice ratio there and spreading out enough stands can significantly improve travel time for taxis that would otherwise return to a depot thus needlessly clogging up your roads.

For every depot you'd ideally have 5 or more stands, unless you plan to use the depots themselves in central locations. Keep in mind as stated before only taxis owned by a depot can enter it, while stands can hold any of them.

Since each taxi goes through a long shift of 10 random passengers, I find every shift for every cab (depending on your city layout) will average out to about the same amount of time.

This means taxiwaves do behave like waves. If you spawn 100 of them at one point, at another point 100 of them will return to their depot when their shifts end. A timer kicks in, I believe 30 seconds or so, before a taxi starts driving again. This causes a short but significant decline in availability.

To prevent waves, expand your capacity slowly in stages, preferably when the first 25-50 cabs are already working their shifts. Spread out your depots and stands evenly. Placing them in one location like I did in the pictures is probably the least efficient way, but worked well for testing.

Depending on how you use them, I find Taxis don't really improve vehicle traffic. A bus, metro or train will carry way more passengers, and offers more 'control'. In that sense it works best for...
All in all I think Taxis are a fun addition to the game that certainly gives your streets a 'bigger' feel to them, but if you are looking for the ultimate traffic solution you'll probably want to look elsewhere.