Hi all, I did a fun project recently with SafeGraph’s Neighborhood Patterns data. I wanted to analyze foot traffic to the Des Moines Farmers Market, an event that is not confined to the usual constraints on a POI. The Farmers Market occupies the streets of downtown Des Moines on Saturday mornings from May through October. This makes it challenging to study with the regular Monthly/Weekly Patterns, but Neighborhood Patterns worked really well!
I did some demographic analysis using Census data—specifically, I focused on age and income. My findings suggest a dip in both metrics in September and October! This dip occurred in both 2018 and 2019 (I focused on pre-pandemic). Check out the notebook to run the code yourself
My hypothesis is that the dips in age and income were caused by college students returning to Des Moines in late August and September. I intend to put that hypothesis to the test in a follow-up project that actually maps the visitor home CBGs—then we can look to see if the CBGs near college campuses are responsible for a higher portion of the visitors. Let me know your thoughts and feedback!