The yellowing of Flatbush Avenue began just before 10 p.m., greeting the area's revelers as they lumbered out of the neighborhood's new nerve center with beer on their breath and their team's logo on their chests.
The people jockeyed for curbside position, stretching their open palms into traffic. Terse words were exchanged. A traffic guard was called in as an arbitrator, waving a glowing orange baton to try to establish order amid the chaos.
"The new Times Square!" a man shouted from the back seat of a passing S.U.V., goading the traffic guard into a hard-won smile.
In its first month of existence, the Barclays Center has helped bolster a shift once thought to be impossible: attracting hordes of yellow taxis to Brooklyn.
Interviews with drivers, residents and traffic guards nearby, combined with city data, suggest that a pattern has emerged: throughout the evening of an event, drivers become more willing to perform drop-offs in the area, or even cruise in adjacent neighborhoods, because they can reasonably expect a return fare to Manhattan. And once an event ends, they descend on the arena to greet the crowd as it leaves.
The trend could upend the unspoken compact between taxi passenger and driver, communicated by a flick of the roof light to off-duty, an invented outer borough surcharge, or perhaps the most demonstrative act of defiance: the cabby simply speeding off, slamming the gas pedal as the question, often rhetorical, curdles in the city air. Will you go to Brooklyn?
In recent years, amid gentrification and neighborhood safety gains, the answer seems to have been shifting gradually. And with the Brooklyn Nets — and, in 2015, the New York Islanders — beginning regular-season games there, that trend seems sure to be amplified.
But according to an early analysis by the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, the arena has already had an impact on the availability of yellow taxis, provided that a rider knows when to hail.
GPS data compiled by the commission shows that total pickups from 7 p.m. to midnight have nearly doubled, to an average of 351 a night, within a quarter-mile of the arena during 14 event nights.
Although the increase was most pronounced in the hours just before and after an event, a jump — a Barclays Bump, perhaps — is also seen during the event itself, distinguishing the arena from other entertainment and athletic hubs outside of Manhattan.
On Sept. 28, when the arena hosted the first of eight Jay-Z concerts, pickups totaled 188 from 8 to 11 p.m., before the concert crowd left, an increase of over 70 percent compared with an average Friday. On Oct. 11, the night of Barbra Streisand's first concert, there were 137 pickups during this period, an increase of 37 percent.
At the Madonna concert at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx on Sept. 6, seven yellow-taxi pickups occurred nearby from 8 to 11 p.m. At the United States Open men's tennis final on Sept. 10, in Flushing, Queens, cabbies performed four pickups in the six hours after the event's scheduled start time.
A typical Yankees game attracts no more than a couple of yellow-taxi pickups per hour after the final out, the commission said. From 11 p.m. to midnight on the night of Ms. Streisand's concert, yellow taxis performed 268 pickups near the arena, more than five times the average for a typical Thursday.
"Taxis follow the business," said Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president. "It's comparable to the burger place." (He was referring to Shake Shack, which opened a restaurant near Borough Hall last year.)
While observing that taxi availability has increased in much of Downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene and Crown Heights over the past decade, however, Mr. Markowitz said many other areas remained with virtually no yellow-taxi service.
David S. Yassky, the city's taxi commissioner, said this reality, and the recent data, underscored the importance of the city's now-stalled plan to provide hail service outside of Manhattan. "If a taxi is dropping somebody off at the Jay-Z concert, there'll be a passenger there hailing it," he said. "But that same passenger is there on nights where there's no Jay-Z concert."
Pickoffs and drop-offs on nonevent nights have seen little change, compared to nights before the arena opened. And in an area with a traffic plan, developed by Sam Schwartz Engineering, that seeks to "promote transit and discourage driving," public transportation remains a preferred option.
So far, though, the arena appears to have created some clear ripples. Mo Mullen, 32, from Clinton Hill, said that while she often used for-hire vehicles, she had in recent weeks stumbled upon yellow taxis on Atlantic Avenue on weekend afternoons. "I've been about to call a car service and then a taxi drives by," she said.
Julius Folorunso, a livery driver from East Flatbush, said the opening of the Barclays Center had not produced the increase in pickups near the arena that he and other for-hire drivers had expected. "You might get one," he said. "Then the whole place is dry."
Many yellow-taxi drivers continue to wade into Brooklyn cautiously. As they drive south on Flatbush Avenue, past the arena and toward Prospect Heights, some set their roof lights to indicate that they are both available and off-duty — a tactic often deployed by drivers seeking to negotiate the geography of their next ride. For drivers heading north, toward Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, the off-duty light is rarely seen.
But at the very least, it seems that drivers have identified a new landmark in an area some have long sought to avoid. On Thursday, two Brooklyn women, Meredith Brown, 31, and Frances Jacobus-Parker, 30, asked a driver to take them from the Upper East Side to the Brooklyn Academy of Music — that cultural pillar of the borough for over 150 years. He told them he did not know where to find it.
So the women floated another idea: take us to the Barclays Center, a short walk away.
That, after three weeks, he was happy to do.
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