Cell Phone Activity in Most Major Cities Dropping

[COcheesehead]

Interesting. See chart.

 

[pacergal]

Random chart or was there an article to go with it?
Interesting, but would like to know the context.
People moving out, less income so purchase less minutes, etc?

 

[MarieIG]

An increase in working remotely?

 

[COcheesehead]

Random chart or was there an article to go with it?
Interesting, but would like to know the context.
People moving out, less income so purchase less minutes, etc?

A Twitter post from CNBC, but read the footnotes for source and more info.
https://downtownrecovery.com/

 

[CaptTom]

Maybe the generation which grew up texting, instead of calling? I certainly don't use voice calls as much as I used to. Just a thought.

Or, maybe downtowns are dying. No loss, IMHO.

 

[COcheesehead]

Somehow I think texting is included in cell activity, but maybe not.

 

[disneysteve]

I’m curious what counts as cell phone activity. Is that use of the cellular network? Calls? Texts? Data usage? What if I’m using my phone on a wifi network? Does that count here? Most every store, office, or restaurant offers wifi now so cellular usage is down a lot.

 

[ProspectiveBum]

I found this page, which talks a bit about the methodology (but is still annoyingly light on specifics): https://downtownrecovery.com/dashboards/text_pages.html

As far as I can tell, they're counting physical cell phone devices in specific geographic areas (possibly via cell phone tower pings? It's unclear).

I was just in San Francisco for a few days on a family vacation, and can report that the city is far from a ghost-town. It's possible that lots of knowledge worker types are working remotely from the East Bay (or further afield) instead of commuting into the city daily. I myself only go into my SoCal office one day a week now, working remotely the other 4 days. My company is pushing for some employees to come in more often, which does seem to be an industry-wide trend.

 

[mpeirce]

Wow, that's seems to be missing tons of context.

It says it's comparing one week in April 2019 to one in April 2023. That may or may not be cherry picked. No way to tell.

There's also no information about what "activity" is. Number of phone calls? Minutes? Data used? Minutes of activity on each cell phone?

Finally the headline says something about downtown San Francisco, does that imply the entire cities or just referring to downtowns? I would have guessed inside city limits, but that's hard to tell.

So not sure what it's suppose to suggest about what's going on.

 

[gauss]

Maybe the generation which grew up texting, instead of calling? I certainly don't use voice calls as much as I used to. Just a thought.

+1 That was my first thought too - or other Internet apps.

-gauss

 

[disneysteve]

I didn't dig too deep into the site but it looks like what they're tracking is the physical presence of cell phones in the study zone. Whether you're using your phone or not, the network knows where you are at all times as long as your phone is turned on. So I guess they're saying there were fewer cell phones present during that time period. I'm sure that would make sense given the increase in remote work.



They also mention that although they are comparing 2019 to 2023, they switched where they were getting their data from in 2022 and have no way to be sure if the data sets are comparable.

 

[thod]

It also seems to be cherry picking cities. They have Fort Worth, but not Dallas.

 

[COcheesehead]

I think the big picture is some cities are recovering better than others.

 

[Major Tom]

I was just in San Francisco for a few days on a family vacation, and can report that the city is far from a ghost-town.

Which areas of SF were you in? The neighborhoods are still busy, but the financial and Union Square districts are noticeably far less populated than before the pandemic. In addition to all the empty office space, a number of large retail outlets are closing, or have already closed. As the caption in the article references downtown SF, and not the city as a whole, the figure of 29% is not entirely out of line with what I have seen when visiting the City.

An increase in working remotely?

I think this has a lot to do with it. It would be interesting to see if there has been an increase in cellphone activity in other areas.

 

[marko]

I was just in San Francisco for a few days on a family vacation, and can report that the city is far from a ghost-town..

Oh, there's people there. Lots of people. Whether they're the kind of people you want to get close to is another thing altogether.