An Intriguingly Detailed Animation of How People Move Around a City

Much of what we know about how people move around a metro area – whether they drive to work, where they're going, how many stops they make along the way – comes from travel diaries that sample households periodically fill out. Increasingly, we can supplement this information with meta-data from new sources like social media, cell phones, or electronic transit fare cards.

But the old-fashioned household travel survey still does the best job of nailing down the details: whether that traveling dot seen from a Foursquare visualization is on a bus or in a car, if she has a job, how much money her household makes. Travel surveys make it possible to disaggregate commuting patterns by income or age group.