MD4C (Mobility Data for Communities) is a new open data platform from the Social Urban Networks Lab (SUNLab) and the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) at Northeastern University. The platform makes large-scale mobility insights accessible to communities, civic organizations, and local decision-makers across Massachusetts.
Most public data describes places through the people who live there: resident population, income, age, commuting mode, or other Census-based measures. Those views are essential, but they miss a major part of how communities work. Town centers, campuses, commercial corridors, healthcare hubs, cultural destinations, and event spaces are also shaped by who visits them, where visitors come from, and what they do while they are there.
MD4C adds this behavioral layer. For areas across Massachusetts, the platform shows patterns of visitor activity and origins, visit purposes, new versus returning visitors, local dependence, and differences between visitor and resident profiles. These measures help communities understand how people actually use places, not only who resides nearby.
The platform is designed for practical community questions: how a downtown functions as a regional destination, how activity around a campus changes with the academic calendar, how a major event reshapes local visitation, or how access to jobs, services, amenities, and small businesses connects places across a region.
MD4C builds on several years of SUNLab research on human mobility data, including methods for bias correction, privacy-preserving analysis, and responsible use of large-scale behavioral data. The project was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded effort to democratize access to mobility data insights and was informed by conversations with local practitioners and policymakers, including the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations.
All data in MD4C is aggregated and privacy-preserving. The platform uses anonymized mobile location data provided by Cuebiq to capture patterns of movement and activity without identifying individuals, and the underlying data has been sanitized to remove visitation to Sensitive Points of Interest.
Together, these tools offer a new lens on Massachusetts communities: not just where people live, but how they move, interact, form connections, and access opportunities.
Platform
Team
Esteban Moro, Hamish Gibbs, Bijin Joseph, Sarah Sanchez, and Dan O’Brien.