Some of you may remember the 3-part Big Data and farmers market posts I did a few months back. Here is another article from Next City that talks of a Big Data partnership for city planners to understand how people move about, to shop and to work.

What is great about this type of big data is that many markets can be a part of this data since a significant number of them accept MasterCard cards, either at the Welcome Booth or among vendors. Think about a funder doing this, using the number of and dollar amount of transaction metrics to analyze with transportation data; it could illuminate the need for more buses during market hours or simply to show the cluster patterns of market shopping among card users. That data could then pinpoint outreach.

By combining MasterCard’s transactions data (they process 43 billion per year) with Cubic’s transportation data, analytics and visualization technology, the platform — dubbed the Urbanomics Mobility Project — will yield insight into the way transit and economic activity are linked in cities.

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-human-is-big-datas-newest-city-planning-tool