With the rapid development of data-driven intelligent transportation systems, an efficient route recommendation method for taxis has become a hot topic in smart cities. We present an effective taxi route recommendation approach (called APFD) based on the artificial potential field (APF) method and Dijkstra method with mobile trajectory big data. Specifically, to improve the efficiency of route recommendation, we propose a region extraction method that searches for a region including the optimal route through the origin and destination coordinates. Then, based on the APF method, we put forward an effective approach for removing redundant nodes. Finally, we employ the Dijkstra method to determine the optimal route recommendation. In particular, the APFD approach is applied to a simulation map and the real-world road network on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. On the map, we randomly select 20 pairs of origin and destination coordinates and use APFD with the ant colony (AC) algorithm, greedy algorithm (A^*), APF, rapid-exploration random tree (RRT), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and Dijkstra for the shortest route recommendation. Compared with AC, A^*, APF, RRT, NSGA-II, and PSO, concerning shortest route planning, APFD improves route planning capability by 1.45%–39.56%, 4.64%–54.75%, 8.59%–37.25%, 5.06%–45.34%, 0.94%–20.40%, and 2.43%–38.31%, respectively. Compared with Dijkstra, the performance of APFD is improved by 1.03–27.75 times in terms of the execution efficiency. In addition, in the real-world road network, on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing, the ability of APFD to recommend the shortest route is better than those of AC, A^*, APF, RRT, NSGA-II, and PSO, and the execution efficiency of APFD is higher than that of the Dijkstra method.