The town centre, five times over
Every phone in Arendal sentrum, estimated every ten minutes.
Fast facts
The festival curve
Daily peak since 6 July. Five ordinary weeks, then Monday.
Show the numbers
Three Tuesdays
The same weekday, a week either side of the peak.
Where they come from
Nine in ten phones are Norwegian. Bars show each country's share of the visitors. The badge is growth on a normal week.
“Rest” is the operator's catch-all for everywhere else. Shares are averaged across festival readings.
The week, hour by hour
Every festival day (10–16 Aug) on one chart. Tap a day to pick it out.
You can see the opening ceremony
Monday. The climb stops at 14:00, when the speeches start.
Two different counts
Peak devices at a given moment vs. unique devices seen that day.
Unique devices per day run about the peak, because people come and go. Both are measured on one mobile network and scaled to estimate all networks.
One week, one crowd
How many different people came, Monday to Friday, each one counted once.
Where do I park?
Day one's most-searched word in Arendal.
Not short of parking. Short of parking where people are going.
So park once, and ride in
Four car parks outside the centre, with the shuttle each would need.
Stoa holds more cars than the whole town centre. Parking from OpenStreetMap; shuttle times at 30 km/h.
Green, amber, red
When the centre is busy, and when it is not.
How busy the town centre was, hour by hour, across Arendalsuka.
The hour strip is measured. The per-car-park lights are an example. Each car park would need its own zone.
What a host town could run on this
Three questions every event asks.
Who can reach you
The jump between those two numbers is Oslo. It arrives on the E18.
Watch it fill
When a car park fills, the signs and shuttle change.
Prove it
This year’s data improves next year’s forecast.
The same data, on a road closure
When E18 at Fornebukrysset dropped from three lanes to one, we modelled where the traffic would go instead, across every road in Bærum and Oslo.
Traffic leaves the motorway and reappears on Bærum’s residential streets: Kveldsroveien, Sandviksveien and Høviksvingen. Not on the signed detour.
Devices, not people: how to read this
Mobile devices inside a 0.37 km² box over Arendal sentrum. Counts are measured on one mobile network and scaled to estimate all networks. These are devices, not headcounts: one person may carry two. Our figures count how many devices are present at one moment; the daily figures count distinct devices across a whole day. The overnight baseline is mostly residents and passing traffic, so the festival crowd is the lift above it, not the total. Origin is shown only as a share of visitors, never as a count, because foreign SIMs cannot be scaled the same way. Tuesday 18 August is a part-day reading (ends 15:10), drawn hollow.