Abstract While being an indispensable mode of transportation, the occupancy rate of taxi vehicles is generally low. In this study, we used a large data set on actual taxi trips to assess how ride sharing could provide means to decrease the number of trips and traveled distance. We implemented a method based the notion of a shareability network, allowing us to determine the set of trips associated with the highest benefit of sharing. Due to the complexity of the problem, we only considered pairwise ride sharing. Even with this limitation, we found that potentially a considerable number of taxi trips can be shared. Our analysis suggested that up to two out of three trips are shareable with at least one other trip. Although shareability is dependent on the length of the time window, a significant proportion of sharing opportunities can be realized even in short time windows.