In New York City, the MTA has stated that it’s seen “ridership tick down a bit in the last week or so.” For anyone who lives there, it probably feels like more than a bit of a tick down, with subway platforms empty at rush hour and the usually bustling Grand Central terminal eerily quiet. In order to visualize what is happening at one of the busiest train terminals in the world, we looked at year-over-year foot traffic numbers at Grand Central to see just how much visitors numbers have fallen in the past few weeks.

The New York auto show, due to take place in April at the Jacob Javits Center, has been postponed until late August. Is this just a temporary setback for the Javits center - one that is likely to be seen across all convention centers, as the appetite for large gatherings dwindles with the spread of COVID-19? Or is it a sign of a longer term hit to the convention industry as a whole?

Recent news reports have highlighted an increase in foot traffic for CostCo as the spread of the coronavirus spurs people to stock up on essentials. Some analysis has put the number of visitors to CotsCo stores in the US up 72% year-over-year. At Advan, we ran a detailed analysis of true foot traffic at CostCo. The graph below shows average daily traffic for each month since October 2015, with year-over-year changes overlaid.

Has travel been affected by the coronavirus, and if so by how much and where? The overall volume of passengers traveling by air affects many of disparate industries - not just airlines but travel sites and aggregators that sell tickets, hotels and car rental companies that rely on airports for a large volume of their business, credit card companies, restaurants and retailers. The list can go on. To try and gauge the impact that a reduction in travel due to the coronavirus might be having on these sectors and more, we analyzed foot traffic in key US and international airports.

Each company trades based on different metrics, but it is fair to say that most consumer discretionary companies, especially those with a growing footprint, are judged by their comparable store sales. This is defined differently by each company, as it is not a standardized GAAP metric, but it typically means “we only measure the performance of stores that have been open for a certain amount of time”, usually anywhere from 3 to 13 months, depending on the company.

Usually the first considerations when a company acquires another is how to realize economies of scale, cross-marketing opportunities, and areas of common improvement. If one knew which shoppers visit each location and quantified the cross-visits between malls then they could make educated decisions about which malls to focus on for improvements, tenant acquisition, or cross marketing. With traditional measuring methods this is hard to achieve, but cellphone location data is the perfect fit for such an exercise.

Markets have reacted very strongly to the potential effects from the coronavirus epidemic in China. MGM, Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resort stocks have been hit particularly hard, dropping 20% since the news, mostly on fears that their Hong Kong and Macau locations will see materially reduced visitors during the annual Lunar Year celebrations. But are the actual effects on business and travel what the market expects or is this an over-reaction?

Department Stores, Restaurants, Malls, all continue growing their traffic on Black Friday on a year over year basis. The growth rate has decelerated a bit, but it’s still in the healthy double-digit numbers, from an already high base. Only Hotels showed negative growth, but less so than in prior years – a weighted average of -1% vs -3% and -2% in 2018 and 2017 respectively. Below are a couple of graphs that illustrate the traffic.

One of the interesting things you can do with access to anonymized, large scale and accurate cellphone location data, is to measure traffic patterns. Consistent with the Big Data theme, we decided to compute this across the whole US, to measure Total Miles Driven. Total Miles Driven is estimated by the Federal Government (aka “FRED”) in a monthly report, which is generated with about a 35 day delay (e.g., the September total miles driven is published in early November).

It comes in many forms: Speech. Movement. Draw within the lines. Wait, scratch that last one. We didn’t like that last one either. When it comes to measuring foot traffic, trade areas, migration patterns, demographics, cross traffic, and in general get behavioral metrics from mobile location data, yesterday’s state of the art was to get canned results on some buildings or venues someone else has decided you might be interested in.