Motionworks Placecast™ by Date provides hourly visits and occupancy at a Motionworks Place or Region for the average week each month since 2019. These insights are produced with the Motionworks Population Intelligence Platform. Placecast™ by Date is best used for investigating trends in counts of activities through time. Dimensions of the data include two key concepts when measuring activity at a place:

• Visits to a Motionworks Place or Region are counted when an individual arrives at the place and left after what is determined to be a significant amount of time. The threshold which defines the amount of dwell time at the place required to constitute a visit is included in the field activities_dwell_threshold.
• Occupancy at a Motionworks Place or Region reports the average number of persons present on average over the time-period reported regardless of when they arrived or how long they stayed.

Consider two examples:

• The first is a gas station where the number of visits reported over an hour may be significantly larger than the Occupancy or average number of people at the location at any one time.
• The opposite end of the spectrum may be an office building where people may arrive in a wave in the morning, recording many visits over a few hours with minimal visits for the rest of the day. However, the occupancy will grow with visits in the morning but then stay at a significant level throughout the work day.

Data Dimensions

• Frequency Published monthly.
• Geographic coverage Summarizes activities for residents of the U.S. for Motionworks Places and Regions.
• Zone systems Not applicable. No zone systems are used in reporting data in this schema.
• Date availability Monthly data since 2019.
• Latency Data are finalized 30 days after the close of the month. For example, by 31 January 2022, data for December 2022 will be released.
• Special Note Some places may return NULL values in the measurement fields for certain hours. Measurement during these hours are being suppressed at these places for privacy purposes.

Research Preview Fields

This dataset includes visit segmentation fields (visits_guests, visits_neighbors, visits_workers, and their corresponding occupancy and dwell time metrics) that are provided as Research Preview data. These fields offer valuable insights into visit composition patterns when analyzed across larger place sets or longer time periods, but users should be aware of their differences:

• Aggregate Analysis Strength: These fields may provide meaningful insights when aggregating across multiple places, larger geographic areas, or extended time periods.
• Individual Place Limitations: At the individual place and specific hour/day level, these fields may contain significant noise and should not be considered as precise as the total visits and occupancy metrics.
• Validation Level: These fields undergo different validation processes than our standard metrics and are intended for exploratory analysis and trend identification.
• Ongoing Development: These segmentation capabilities represent active areas of methodological development and refinement.
• Recommended Use: Best suited for understanding general visit patterns, comparative analysis across place types, and identifying broad behavioral trends rather than precise visit counts for specific times and locations.

For applications requiring the highest precision and reliability, we recommend using the total visits, occupancy, and dwell time metrics, which undergo our full validation and verification processes.

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