How connected is Boston to the world?

I enjoyed today's article in Mass High Tech (link above) written by Doug Banks, entitled "Checking the Traffic Density Jobs Indicator." Doug was musing about the lightness of traffic over the past year and its correlation to employment in Boston. As a geographer and a broker, I realized that Doug had become a student of geography and specifically of aereal connections which is a significant subset of the field. I'm getting boring so here's a story.

On August 6, 2006, Madonna performed at the Stadio Olympico in Rome. This is the rather infamous concert in which she sang while on a cross. All cellphone usage was measured coming from the Stadio. The lines terminated at major cities around the world and the thickness of the line indicated the volume of flow. Interestingly, NYC did not have the thickest flow (nor did Miami!). The strongest flow was to Paris. There are several 3D maps of this cellphone phenomenon.

I’ve included one showing the flow right over Rome.

Mapping connections between places in a formal manner had its beginnings in maps of the railroads in the 1870's, which showed freight tonnage flows between cities. NYC was still the dominant hub but in 10 years, Chicago had claimed its position atop the freight world as shown by the thickness of the volume of freight of all kinds coming into the City of the Big Shoulders.

A more recent example of aereal conncection maps is this DOT map of the volume of vehicular freight movement among major US cities in 2002. It served as a guideline for anticipating major roadway repairs.

So what does this have to do with Boston and real estate? Everything. We are exporters of knowledge and technology. We don't send barges of wheat down the Mystic River nor do we load much coal to ship to China. And if we are exporting something you can't touch, how do we measure our impact?

There are numerous links showing Boston's connections as measured by number of flights and passengers on the FAA website and the Massport website. But the best site I have ever seen, because it is animated, can be found at http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/. What Aaron has done is cover flights on a continuous basis over the course of a day. And it is absolute artwork. Watch Boston and San Francisco. You will notice a particularly thick line between San Francisco and Boston? Ditto for internet traffic and ditto for cellphone traffic. There are not many flights between Boston and Toronto and not many between Boston and Dallas. And both of these cities are much larger than both Boston and San Francisco. NYC is the most connected city to Boston and, in fact to every other city in the US, but it is flow of all types of communication between two cities that determine the degree of their intreaction. And high tech, high knowledge cities tend to connect with other high tech, high knowledge cities. Boston is connected where it counts. And connections mean jobs which means demand for real estate. Boston's vacancy rate has been hovering between 9 and 10%. The vacancy rate for space in the the Dallas CBD is 30%. Connections are good.

So when you're cruising or crawling down 93, you can thank Doug Banks and be happy about the economy. Or you can just mutter under your breath.