When I moved to Boston for my Ph.D., I quickly noticed how little reliable data we actually have about how people move around cities. We talk about “car dependence,” “walkable neighborhoods” or “transit equity,” but the evidence often comes from self-reported surveys last updated a decade ago. Most of those surveys rely on memory: people are asked to recall every trip they made yesterday. As you can imagine, that kind of data misses a lot.
How smartphones are helping us understand how people really move through cities
