One of my first projects with Downtown Project was to understand how people moved around downtown Las Vegas in the form of heat maps. The goal was to understand the evolution of this traffic over time and use this to help guide future investments.
Our City Science team started by generating heat maps over time and familiarising ourselves with the natural ebbs and flow of walking traffic. We had access to a single source of WiFi data that spanned over dozens of properties and hundreds of routers. So we did this by logging, classifying and visualizing information collected in the form of MAC Addresses of all WiFi enabled phones. We identified the recurring patterns that resulted from events, holidays and propertie activations. We collectively called these patterns the "heartbeat" of the city as seen in the visual above.
One of our main goals with this work was to quantify non-monetary metrics that were useful for measuring the success of long term investments. So in addition to the general traffic heat maps we also classified a sub metrics called collisionable hours. These collisionable hour reports were valuable as a proxy for trust, ideas flow and community strength. They were created by placing geo-fences around public areas where people had the potential to meet each other and share ideas. We would then separate unique totals from these areas, divide them over time and show a measurable return on collisions (ROC) per investment.