(Christopher Sadowski)
THANK$: A cabby makes change at Penn Station, where tips are high during rush hour. (Getty Images)
So that’s how you get a cabby to go to the outer boroughs!
Riders who hail from Brooklyn, Queens and upper Manhattan routinely dole out higher percentage tips than the average cab passenger — because they have to bribe hacks to haul them home, according to an unprecedented TLC analysis of taxi tipping data obtained by The Post.
“Nobody wants to take you to Brooklyn,” said Kevin Kriebel, 31, of Prospect Heights, the top tipping neighborhood for Saturday-night drop-offs.
To ensure a ride home, he often tells cabbies, “I’ll take care of you.”
The hacks quickly get the hint, he says.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission crunched tipping data for all credit-card trips over a week in January, breaking it down by neighborhood in three different categories: overall tip percentages, rush-hour tip percentages and percentages for drop-offs on Saturday nights — the prime time when people are returning home from Manhattan.
The data revealed several trends, including:
* Eight of the 10 highest-tipping drop-off neighborhoods in the city on Saturday nights are in Brooklyn.
* Riders in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods — such as Gramercy, SoHo, and the Upper West Side — are stingy, falling well below the citywide average tip of 19.1 percent.
* Tourists are also cheap, with riders getting picked up at the area’s airports forking over only an average 17.3 percent tip.
The overall best tips in the city, regardless of time of day, came from trips that originated in Washington Heights, where the average credit-card tip was 25.3 percent.
By comparison, the average weekday tip is 19.1 percent.
“These guys turn me down all the time. When I am down in Brooklyn, I tell them ‘Washington Heights,’ and sometimes the driver pulls away before I can even start talking about money,” said Daniel Rivera, 29, an electrician who works near the Polo Grounds Community Center.
“I know these guys are busting their humps for 12 hours or more, so I always give them a nice tip. And I tell them that I’ll give them one when they pull over.”
The same can’t be said for riders in swanky Gramercy, SoHo and the East Village, which all averaged a 19 percent tip — just below the citywide standard.
Other Manhattan riders who fall below average include those on the Upper West Side, who average 18.7 percent, and in Battery Park City, averaging 18 percent.
When it comes to the weekday rush hour, Midtown is the best tipping area.
During that time, passengers gave an average of 22.2 percent in tips on credit cards.
But the most telling revelations came from the Saturday-night statistics.
Promising cabbies fat gratuities for driving outside of Manhattan is a Brooklyn tradition right up there with Coney Island hot dogs and stickball, longtime residents explained.
Prospect Heights was tops in the city, averaging a 21 percent tip for drivers on Saturday nights between 10 p.m. and midnight.
That’s well above the average 18.6 percent tip left city-wide for that period of time.
“You definitely might say that you will tip more to get a cab home,” said Jenna Krong, 24, who usually tells her driver that she’ll leave 25 percent.
Subway-starved Greenpoint came in second, averaging 20.3 percent for late-night trips that ended there.
And rounding out the late-night Top Five were Park Slope with a 19.9 percent average, Fort Greene with a 19.8 percent average, and Carroll Gardens-Red Hook, which averaged 19.7 percent.
Only one neighborhood in the top 10 tipping spots during the Saturday-evening rush was in Manhattan.
Not surprisingly, it’s the far-flung Upper East Side, with an average tip of 19.4 percent.
Queens — arguably an even less popular destination spot for cabbies than Brooklyn — also cracked the Top 10 with Sunnyside.
That ’hood averaged 19.3 percent for tips.
The city culled the data after making recent changes to the way credit-card machines collect tips.
The changes involved eliminating the dollar amounts offered on some trips in favor of a uniform system in which riders are given four options — 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent, or enter your own.
“The big lesson to me was New Yorkers don’t like to be told what to tip,” said TLC Chairman David Yassky, noting that the data showed many bypassed the preset percentages in favor of their own math.
“They’ll leave what they think is appropriate.”
Additional reporting by Dan MacLeod and Frank Rosario