The traffic light turns red at the corner of Avenida Juárez and Eje Central, the busiest pedestrian crossing in Mexico City, used by around 9,000 people every hour. Tonight, a driver stops his grey Peugeot exactly on the crossing where the masses are trying to pass. His car is now a steel barrier for those trying to reach the Palacio de Bellas Artes. A masked man dressed in black makes his way through the river of people, walking purposefully towards the Peugeot. His black and white striped cape, reminiscent of a zebra crossing, flaps behind him. He goes to the car, flings his cape over his shoulder, and pushes the Peugeot backwards to make space.
“My name is Peatónito, and I fight for the rights of pedestrians,” he says, introducing himself.
[pop-up] urbain on 26 Dec 13"This article was taken from the June issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online Human habits -- what we do, when, where and how often -- are the realm of psychology and economics. But physics? "Good science usually starts with data," says 43-yearold Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at Northeastern University in Boston. "Whether you study atoms or people, measuring things is the first step to understanding." Barabási analyses location data from mobile phone users, mapping the daily movements of millions of people over months. For his most recent study, he and his team studied data from 50,000 people randomly pulled from a research pool of ten million. They concluded that human mobility patterns are very regular -- up to 93 percent predictable."