Wednesday 3 December 2008

Mobile phones by hour of day, day of week

This is a pretty big image -it's the phones by hour by day table presented as a graph; every day appears side-by-side. Follow the link to see it at a resolution where it works.

Some immediate observations
  • Nobody walks around between 0400 and 0600.
  • The rest of the time, the streets are busy.
  • Friday and Saturday night are when people stay out late -so late that Saturday and Sunday Mornings are peak hours beween 0000 and 0400.
  • Weekday traffic peaks in the morning between 0700 and 1100. There's a quieter spot, a busy lunchtime, then another quiet spot. But not much in it -traffic throughout the day is fairly constant.
  • Peak evening times - monday to thursday- are from 1500 to 1800
  • Less people come past at that time on a Friday -instead traffic is higher later on in the day. Possibly going straight from work/study to enjoy themselves, coming back afterwards.
  • Sat and Sun have later starts, but their mid-day traffic is on a par with weekday midday traffic
  • Saturday and Sunday's traffic levels seem the most mathematically "normal": traffic goes up, peaks mid-afternoon, then declines. On weekdays, office/study/school hours interfere.
  • Monday is the quietest. Less people out at in the early morning, less people on every hour.
More complex work would break it up by phone: identify who was returning; also do some grouping tricks to identify students by term times and then then see if their phones have a significant different grouping.

3 comments:

Chris Hutt said...

Could the last bullet point be related to the third?

SteveL said...

Certainly with sunday; I'm just very surprised about monday. It's not just people not going out, they arent even going to work. Or study.

Chris Hutt said...

You forget to give this post a title.