Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.

In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.

The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.

But why was there such a spread in recoveries?

One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.

Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.

The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.