Cool map alert: CARTO’s ‘A Million Walks in the Park’ is incredible

Using data from more than a million phones, CARTO produced a study on New York City’s parks that is equally informative and beautiful.

It’s called A Million Walks in the Park and in it the Bushwick startup analyzes all sorts of data to put together a story of how people use parks.

“By clustering spatial data, we are able to understand different regions of activities within two of the most popular public parks in New York City One, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn,” the company wrote in the report, showing Central Park and Prospect Park.

It was able to show “clusters of people based on what percent of their time is shared with other people in that space. We then identified unique points of interest near each cluster that may have brought those groups of people together.”

This isn’t how we usually look at our cities. What CARTO is doing here is putting together the stories we tell ourselves to understand the world around us into maps and data we can study. We suspect CARTO will not stop with this at parks.