Reality Mining and Good-Bye Suburbia

BusinessWeek had 2 interesting articles in last week's issue. They were a couple pages apart even and they complimented each other well.

The first is a really interesting new data series - mobile phone locations. As your phone drives around, it is constantly in communication with the different cell phone towers so that you are located if they need to make your phone ring.

Well, it turns out, your carrying a large RFID tag. The cell companies have a record of who was linked to what tower when. Meaning, they know where you have been. Imagine the terabytes of data they have. Phone #123-4567 is here and here and here. For retail geographers, this could be the holy grail.

With the phone number, you know where the person lives, so you have accurate geo-demographics. Then you can track this person anywhere. You have an idea where they work, where they play, or where they hide from the world. Beyond that, you can simulate traffic patterns. This'd be huge for billboard people - X million people with this demographic profile drive by your sign.

For restaurants, its all about traffic, and now you can put a time stamp demographic profile, byt ime of day and day of week, for this specific corner. For land developers, you have a time series of traffic patterns to identify quick growing areas or areas with changing traffic patterns.

Wow.

In contrast, we have the end of suburbia. James Kunstler, an author I am not familiar with, says that with gas prices permanently rising, the suburbs, which are a waste of resources, will decline sharply. It will be too expensive to drive from home, to school, to soccer practice, etc. He states that cheap gas (and cars) makes suburbia possible.

This is true. In the good ol' days, cities had incredible density with decent public transportation (watch Roger Rabbit again). As everyone was able to get cars and fill them with cheap gas, developers created suburbs and here we are. Kunstler thinks suburbs will be hurting within 5 years.

He also says that biofuels and hybrids won't help since they won't reduce oil consumption enough to drop demand (therefore price). He thinks "anything organized on a grand scale is liable to fall into trouble - government, finance, corporate enterprise, agribusiness, schools."

Ouch.

Well, at least we can monitor the decline with cell phone tower data...