Civic Knowledge

Richard Florida’s article in the Wall Street Journal documents the early results of worker’s shift from offices to Zoom; falling rents and increasing vacancies in expensive large metros and the opposite trend in smaller less expensive metros, using data provided by Apartment List.

The Apartment List data shows a very broad decline in US rents compared to previous years, starting in with the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. However, the national declines are primarily due to rent drops in expensive coastal cities. More affordable cities, however, have seen significant rent increases:

San Diego has the world’s largest municipal Internet-of-things deployment,  which I got access to recently and have been pulling data from. I’ve now got about 30 million parking records — events when a car enters or leaves a parking zone — and have been processing and analyzing the data for the last few weeks.

The raw data is a bit difficult to use, because there are a lot of spurious events, but it isn’t hard to clean them out. The result is records, at 15 minute intervals, of the number of cars parked in each of the 6,600 parking zones across the city. Here are the two processed datasets.

San Diego’s CityIQ system – the 4,400 smart street lamps installed across the city – yields detailed data about pedestrian movements. We’ve condensed a few hundred gigabytes of observations of pedestrians from August 2018 to June 2019 into a dataset of about 31M records, with the counts of the number of people walking in 2,600 walkways. I’d analyzed an earlier dataset to expose daily patterns of pedestrian traffic, and now, with a more complete dataset, I’m exploring other topics. The latest is a look at the streets where San Diego parties and works downtown.

San Diego’s CityIQ system consists of about 4,400 smart street lamps, which use a variety of sensors to track parking, pedestrians, traffic and a variety of environmental conditions. This analysis reveals pedestrian paterns using time-oriented heatmaps.

This dataset aggregates the number of pedestrians, traveling in either direction, into 15 minute intervals, per walkway, and links the walkways to communities. Then, data is visualized by community in a heat map with two time dimensions, known as a rhythm map. Since this data is only available for the prior 6 months, we can’t analyze long term patterns, so we only present a few types of maps, including traffic for hour of day versus day of week and for hour of day versus week of year.

Pedestrian counts fromSan Diego’s smart streetlamps indicate that San Diegans responded strongly to stay at home orders, but the data has some weaknesses, and the reduction has several causes.

In 2018, San Diego installed over 4,000 smart street lamps, one of the largest deployments of the CityIQ system in the world. These Internet-connected street lights give developers access to data on the intensity of pedestrians and traffic. But not anyone’s identity — the data is completely anonymous.