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Welcome to Commuting Zones

What are the Commuting Zones?#

Commuting zones are geographic areas where people live and work and are useful for understanding local economies, as well as how they differ from traditional boundaries.

Why are Commuting Zones useful?#

One standard version of commuting zones does not exist for the whole world. Meta is able to build a version of commuting zones for the world based on summing up inputs like cities that people put on their Facebook profile and location information people choose to share with Facebook. We can build our commuting zones consistently across all regions where we have sufficient numbers of users to protect privacy. We are able to update our commuting zones estimates more often than census-based methods to see how they evolve over time or are altered rapidly by a crisis. ​

Commuting zones represent areas where we spend the majority of our time. These areas of economic integration are independent from political boundaries and can illustrate how economic communities and commute patterns transcend regional boundaries. Furthermore, although the definition of regional boundaries can also vary substantially across countries, we create the commuting zones in a consistent way across the world. USDA ERS commuting zones have been used in a number of economic studies. By providing a representation of areas that are closely connected across the world, our commuting zones may be helpful for these studies as well as epidemiological research aimed at understanding where diseases may be transmitted.

Getting Started#

Get started by installing the Commuting Zones R package.

Or try our Commuting Zones walkthrough.