How Germany Moves

Telefonica West has used mobile phone data to visualize the movements of every single German by hour and by day. The result is a huge animated interactive map which reveals the daily commuting patterns of the whole population in every German town and city.

So bewegt sich Deutschland is an animated map which uses anonymous location data from mobile phones to show the movements of Germans by air and by road. Five billion data points are generated every day by Germans as they move around the country with their mobile phones. This map visualizes that data to show the movements of Germans over a typical week. For reasons of security each of the moving markers on the map represents a large number of anonymous travelers not individual Germans.

Using the map it is possible to zoom in on individual towns and cities to view when most people commute to and from work. In fact if you type in a postcode you can see at what time the average commuter in that area starts their day and how that compares to the national average. You can also observe how big a catchment area for commuters each city has. For example people commute into Hamburg from much larger distances than those commuting in and out of Munich.