This is one of the most complete pictures of a city’s daily movement that money can buy. Eigh hundred and ninety million trips.

Origin-destination matrix from mobile phone data (XDR records) in Santiago, Chile. 658k H3 hex-to-hex pairs, 6.5 weeks of observations, top 2,000 flows ranked by log(volume) x sqrt(distance).

Each arc is a quadratic Bezier between H3 resolution-8 cell centroids (~460 m edges). Hexagons colored by log10 of total trip throughput. Dark background, no basemap, just the data.

Tower density in Santiago varies by two orders of magnitude between urban core and rural periphery, which means short-distance and rural trips are systematically invisible. These are three stylistic variations (amber, electric, and magenta/pink) of the uncorrected picture.

– Code: https://github.com/leoferres/mobilens
– Preprint: https://zenodo.org/records/19484460