Boston Foot Traffic

Where should a food truck park? The City of Boston’s Office of Small Business fields that question constantly, and the honest answer used to be a guess. Boston Foot Traffic replaced the guess with evidence: a public website that turns anonymized foot-traffic data into heat maps and siting recommendations a small-business owner can actually read.

I led the three-person team end to end over a semester at Brown’s MPA program: scoped the engagement with the City, ran the client meetings, and delivered the analysis on schedule. I also owned the entire build, from information architecture and brand through interactive maps, data visualization, and deployment on Cloudflare, and wrote all the site copy so the research reads as a story rather than a dataset.

It worked. The project received the MPA program’s Policy in Action Award, and the Director of the Office of Small Business confirmed in a formal letter of appreciation that the team’s heat maps now inform the City’s data-driven vendor-siting decisions. A pilot site our research identified is slated for the City’s FY27 push cart pilot program.

The site is live at bostonfoottraffic.com.