Understanding how environmental attributes can influence the behavior of pedestrians is of concern for public health officials, transportation engineers, and urban planners. Cityways explores the cities of San Francisco and Boston using billions of data points collected via activity monitoring apps. Tens of millions of self-tracking applications are used by people eager to monitor how many calories they consume, how many hours they sleep, how many steps they take. By analyzing 2.2 million trips from 135,000 people, we can start to understand the factors that influence outdoor human activity—such as weather, urban morphology, topography, traffic, the presence of green spaces, etc.—in this, the largest high-resolution study on non-motorized human mobility ever performed.
Anthony Vanky was the PhD Researcher on this project, led by Carlo Ratti at the MIT Senseable City Lab.
