Year long cell-phone monitoring has shocking results about movement/travel.

(AP) --Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.
The scientists would not disclose where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.
Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months.

Knowing people's travel patterns can help design better transportation systems and give doctors guidance in fighting the spread of contagious diseases, he said.
The results also tell us something new about ourselves, including that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly, he said.

"Despite the fact that we think of ourselves as spontaneous and unpredictable ... we do have our patterns we move along and for the vast majority of people it's a short distance," Barabasi said.

The study found that nearly half of the people in the study pretty much keep to a circle little more than six miles wide and that 83 percent of the people tracked mostly stay within a 37-mile wide circle.

But then there are the people who are the travel equivalent of the super-rich, said Hidalgo, who travels more than 150 miles every weekend to visit his girlfriend. Nearly 3 percent of the population regularly go beyond a 200-mile wide circle. Less than 1 percent of people travel often out of a 621-mile circle.