Abstract The fast advancement in sensor data acquisition and communication technology greatly facilitates the collection of data from taxis, and thus enables analyzing the citywide taxi service system. In this paper, we present a novel and practical system for taxi service monitoring, analytics and visualization. By utilizing both of the buffered streaming and the large-size historical taxi data, the system focuses on wait time estimation (for both passengers and taxi drivers), citywide taxi pickup/dropoff hotspots, as well as the taxi trip distributions. The three-dimensional (3D) visualization is designed for users to access the analytics results and understand the characteristics of the taxi service.