As information and telecommunication technologies provide us with more flexible working habits and transportation allows us an ever increasing geographical reach, a new phenomenon is emerging in contemporary America: extreme commuting. In the past, the distance between our home and work location used to be just a few miles or tens of miles; today, an increasing number of Americans regularly cover distances of 100 miles or more to commute to work several times a month.
These maps, created using aggregated, anonymous data from the AT&T cellphone network, depict commuting patterns in eight major US urban areas. As one can see, basins of attraction are so large that they start to overlap, covering the whole country: the United Cities of America.
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Commuter circles
- Research team
- Till Nagel
- Dominik Dahlem
- Alexandre Gerber
- DeDe Paul
- Carlo Ratti
- James Rowland
- Chris Rath
- Anthony Townsend
- Mitchell Moss
- Carson Qing
- Credits
- MIT Senseable City Lab
- IBM Research
- AT&T Labs — Research
- New York University
- Thanks to
- Volkswagen of America
- General Electric, and
- all the members of the MIT Senseable City Consortium
Contact Info
- It is duly credited as a project by the MIT Senseable City Lab.
- PDF copy of the publication is sent to senseable-press@mit.edu
Commuter rings
Dot density map
