The streets of the city are consistently congested, but how much of urban movement is caused by social stimuli? In a recent study, Professor Marta Gonzalez and her team introduce a new method of inferring the relationship between urban mobility and social activity. Using anonymized phone data from three major cities in Europe and South America, Gonzalez and her team developed a novel means of quantifying the level at which social activity stimulates a city’s travel activity patterns. According to Gonzalez, this is an innovative method of analyzing traffic data and will catalyze the creation of an analytical tool for transport planners and policymakers. Read the MIT News article.