An interesting story yesterday, on the AP wires [1]:
Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
Well, OK. Leaving aside the security/morality issues involved, we can make use of the data collected, in the following way;
We may assume that we are talking about phones somewhere else in the world, given that as they suggest such a study would be against the law, here. Likely, then, given that and given the raw numbers, we’re talking about the EU. What we have is a picture of mobility, or the lack thereof, in Europe.
[1]Well first, that meshes because at $6 and $8 per gallon of gas, no bloody wonder nobody ever travels. But more; We’re so often told about the wonders of mass transportation, as they have it in the EU. However, if we are to take this study at face value, we now have a better idea why it works so well; Nobody really goes anywhere… they’re not nearly the Mobile society that we ar here in the ‘states. It’s not because the system is so great, it’s that people tend to avoid using it.
Seems to me that this negates all the worship of the European system of transportation… high gas taxes, heavy relience on mass transit. Because, as this study points out, nobody really goes anywhere. The result of the European way of handing problems of transport is people simply avoid travel, altogether.
Is that really what they want for us here in the ‘states?