Understanding peoples’ travel activity patterns, and ideally understanding the motivations and choices underlying them, are at the heart of what transport planners do, writes World Bank blogger Shomik Mehndiratta. He describes work by Professor Marta Gonzalez and colleagues to analyze mobile phone call records (CDRs), which can provide a huge database about trips within a region much faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. In the future, he speculates that CDRs could become a valuable tool for transport planners. Combined with the analytic power of new computing techniques, this new data collection method might significantly disrupt long-established ways of doing business across the development world, he concludes. Read the World Bank blog.