The City Pulse of Buenos Aires

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of anonymized cell phone data to analyze urban population distribution and travel patterns in Buenos Aires, aiming to provide a cost-effective, real-time alternative to traditional urban planning surveys.

Contribution

It demonstrates the viability of using cell phone records for urban and transportation planning, offering a scalable, real-time approach compared to traditional polling methods.

Findings

Cell phone data accurately estimates population distribution.

Compared to traditional surveys, cell data provides more frequent insights.

The method enables real-time monitoring of urban mobility flows.

Abstract

Cell phone technology generates massive amounts of data. Although this data has been gathered for billing and logging purposes, today it has a much higher value, because its volume makes it very useful for big data analyses. In this project, we analyze the viability of using cell phone records to lower the cost of urban and transportation planning, in particular, to find out how people travel in a specific city (in this case, Buenos Aires, in Argentina). We use anonymized cell phone data to estimate the distribution of the population in the city using different periods of time. We compare those results with traditional methods (urban polling) using data from Buenos Aires origin-destination surveys. Traditional polling methods have a much smaller sample, in the order of tens of thousands (or even less for smaller cities), to maintain reasonable costs. Furthermore, these studies are performed at most once per decade, in the best cases, in Argentina and many other countries. Our objective is to prove that new methods based on cell phone data are reliable, and can be used indirectly to keep a real-time track of the flow of people among different parts of a city. We also go further to explore new possibilities opened by these methods.