The Boston Globe estimated that two-thirds of the city’s 165,000 properties change hands every year. As thousands of students move in and out of the city, what does the landscape look like on September 1st? To help answer this question, I downloaded data from the city of boston from Analyze Boston and created this Tableau Web App .
This data tracks individual moving van permits from the city, where a mover has paid a fee in advance of the moving date. A moving permit is not required by the city, but insures that the owner will not receive parking tickets and will be garanteed a parking spot. Each dot on the map represents a moving permit issued by the City of Boston between 2012 and 2017.
App Screenshot
If you ask a local, they would tell you that the reason for number of movers is due the fact that many annual leases begin on September 1st, and that many college students move in as the new semester begins.
So which areas are the impacted most?
In each of these areas, there is a spike in the number of moving van permits on the week of September 1st. This is not effect is not just isolated to housing close to universities, but across the downtown metro area as a whole.
What can the city do to improve the situation? Already there have been efforts to raise awareness about the traffic, logistical difficulty, and overall chaos of September 1st. Universities now distribute information for students encouraging earlier move-ins. This has produced visible change. The graph below shows how the number of moving permits shifts to late-August for the more recent years, as opposed to 2012-2014.
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