As a key energy challenge, we urgently require a better understanding of how growing urban populations interact with municipal energy systems and the resulting impact on energy demand across city neighborhoods, which are dense hubs of both consumer population and CO2 emissions. Currently, the physical characteristics of urban infrastructure are the main determinants in predictive modeling of the demand side of energy in our rapidly growing urban areas; overlooking influence related to fluctuating human activities. Here, we show how applying intra-urban human mobility as an indicator for interactions of the population with local energy systems can be translated into spatial imprints to predict the spatial distribution of energy use in urban settings. Our findings establish human mobility as an important element in explaining the spatial structure underlying urban energy flux and demonstrate the utility of a human mobility driven approach for predicting future urban energy demand with implications for CO2 emission strategies.
The study of human mobility patterns is of both theoretical and practical values in many aspects. For long-distance travels, a few research endeavors have shown that the displacements of human travels follow the power-law distribution. However, controversies remain in the issue of the scaling law of human mobility in intra-urban areas. In this work we focus on the mobility pattern of taxi passengers by examining five datasets of the three metropolitans of New York, Dalian and Nanjing. Through statistical analysis, we find that the lognormal distribution with a power-law tail can best approxima…
Although severe mobility restrictions are recognized as the key enabler to contain COVID-19, there has been few scientific studies to validate such approach, especially in urban context. This study analyzes mobility pattern changes in Seoul, South Korea that adopted adaptive approach toward mobility. Intervention analyses reveal that major mobility reduction did occur two weeks before the city's case peak. Such voluntary adjustments exhibit strong preference shift toward private mode from public transit. Large reductions occurred in non-essential and high-contact activities of shopping and din…
Mobility energetic balance frames spatial configuration of cities
Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB)（综合物理与复杂系统研究所）；Human Openware Research Lab (HOWLab), Engineering Research Institute of Aragon (I3A), University of Zaragoza (UZ)（萨拉戈萨大学阿拉贡工程研究院）；Arquitecturas Open Source (AOS) Research Group, School of Architecture and Technology, Universidad San Jorge（圣乔治大学建筑与技术学院）
Cities are complex systems comprised of socioeconomic systems relying on critical services delivered by multiple physical infrastructure networks. Due to interdependencies between social and physical systems, disruptions caused by natural hazards may cascade across systems, amplifying the impact of disasters. Despite the increasing threat posed by climate change and rapid urban growth, how to design interdependencies between social and physical systems to achieve resilient cities have been largely unexplored. Here, we study the socio-physical interdependencies in urban systems and their effect…
In this work, we address the connection between population density centers in urban areas, and the nature of human flows between such centers, in shaping the vulnerability to the onset of contagious diseases. A study of 163 cities, chosen from four different continents reveals a universal trend, whereby the risk induced by human mobility increases in those cities where mobility flows are predominantly between high population density centers. We apply our formalism to the spread of SARS-COV-2 in the United States, providing a plausible explanation for the observed heterogeneity in the spreading…
The scales of urban mobility shape socioeconomic mixing
Central European University（中欧大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；TU Dortmund University（多特蒙德工业大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research（马克斯·普朗克人口研究研究所）；Liverpool University（利物浦大学）
This study identifies the limitations and underlying characteristics of urban mobility networks that influence the performance of the gravity model. The gravity model is a widely-used approach for estimating and predicting population flows in urban mobility networks, assuming the scale-free property. Prior studies have reported good performance results for the gravity model at certain levels of aggregation. However, the characteristics of urban mobility networks might vary depending on the spatial and temporal resolutions of data. Hence, the sensitivity of gravity model performance to variatio…
Mobility cross spatial units represents the embodiment of how people manage activities between locations along temporal sequences. Spatiotemporal pattern nevertheless interacts with the socioeconomic characteristics of respected origin (push factors) and destination (pull factors) which widely discussed in spatial interaction literature. Observing this dynamics at higher spatial resolution allows us to entangle multifaceted nature of city, its complexity as a system or network, and the way it shapes movement of people. This study explore the extent interconnected elements of urban system or ur…
Urban mobility systems are composed multiple elements with strong interactions, i.e. their future is co-determined by the state of other elements. Thus, studying components in isolation, i.e. using a reductionist approach, is inappropriate. I propose five recommendations to improve urban mobility based on insights from the scientific study of complex systems: use adaptation over prediction, regulate interactions to avoid friction, use sensors to recover real time information, develop adaptive algorithms to exploit that information, and deploy agents to act on the urban environment.
Understanding the relationship between spatial structures of cities and environmental hazard exposures (such as urban heat) is essential for urban health and sustainability planning. However, a critical knowledge gap exists in terms of the extent to which socio-spatial networks shaped by human mobility exacerbate or alleviate urban heat exposures of populations in cities. In this study, we utilize location-based data to construct human mobility networks in twenty metropolitan areas in the U.S. The human mobility networks are analyzed in conjunction with the urban heat characteristics of spatia…
It is very important to understand urban mobility patterns because most trips are concentrated in urban areas. In the paper, a new model is proposed to model collective human mobility in urban areas. The model can be applied to predict individual flows not only in intra-city but also in countries or a larger range. Based on the model, it can be concluded that the exponential law of distance distribution is attributed to decreasing exponentially of average density of human travel demands. Since the distribution of human travel demands only depends on urban planning, population distribution, reg…
The rising adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) leads to the alignment of their electricity and their mobility demands. Therefore, transportation and power infrastructures are becoming increasingly interdependent. In this work, we uncover patterns of PEV mobility by integrating for the first time two unique data sets: (i) mobile phone activity of 1.39 million Bay Area residents and (ii) charging activity of PEVs in 580,000 sessions obtained in the same region. We present a method to estimate individual mobility of PEV drivers at fine temporal and spatial resolution integrating survey d…
Percolation Transition of K-Destinations Reveals Universal Backbone of Urban Mobility Networks
Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems, Peking University（北京大学遥感与地理信息系统研究所）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
The vast majority of travel takes place within cities. Recently, new data has become available which allows for the discovery of urban mobility patterns which differ from established results about long distance travel. Specifically, the latest evidence increasingly points to exponential trip length distributions, contrary to the scaling laws observed on larger scales. In this paper, in order to explore the origin of the exponential law, we propose a new model which can predict individual flows in urban areas better. Based on the model, we explain the exponential law of intra-urban mobility as …
Measuring traffic performance is critical for public agencies who manage traffic and individuals who plan trips, especially when special events happen. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced almost every aspect of daily life, including urban traffic patterns. Thus, it is important to measure the impact of COVID-19 on transportation to further guide agencies and residents to properly respond to changes in traffic patterns. However, most existing traffic performance metrics incorporate only a single traffic parameter and measure only the performance of individual corridors. To overco…
Urban mobility enables deprivation bubble breaking in Indian and Mexican cities
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Lund University（隆德大学）；Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi（恩里科·费米研究中心）；ISI Foundation（ISI基金会）
Existing urban boundaries are usually defined by government agencies for administrative, economic, and political purposes. Defining urban boundaries that consider socio-economic relationships and citizen commute patterns is important for many aspects of urban and regional planning. In this paper, we describe a method to delineate urban boundaries based upon human interactions with physical space inferred from social media. Specifically, we depicted the urban boundaries of Great Britain using a mobility network of Twitter user spatial interactions, which was inferred from over 69 million geo-lo…
Urbanization drives the epidemiology of infectious diseases to many threats and new challenges. In this research, we study the interplay between human mobility and dengue outbreaks in the complex urban environment of the city-state of Singapore. We integrate both stylized and mobile phone data-driven mobility patterns in an agent-based transmission model in which humans and mosquitoes are represented as agents that go through the epidemic states of dengue. We monitor with numerical simulations the system-level response to the epidemic by comparing our results with the observed cases reported d…
The objective of this study is to propose and test an adaptive reinforcement learning model that can learn the patterns of human mobility in a normal context and simulate the mobility during perturbations caused by crises, such as flooding, wildfire, and hurricanes. Understanding and predicting human mobility patterns, such as destination and trajectory selection, can inform emerging congestion and road closures raised by disruptions in emergencies. Data related to human movement trajectories are scarce, especially in the context of emergencies, which places a limitation on applications of exi…
Revealing the structural properties and understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of the urban heavy truck mobility network (UHTMN) provide insights in assessment of freight policies to manage and regulate the urban freight system, and are of vital importance for improving the livability and sustainability of cities. Although massive urban heavy truck mobility data become available in recent years, in-depth studies on the structure and evolution of UHTMN are still lacking. Here we use massive urban heavy truck GPS data in China to construct the UHTMN and reveal its a wide range of structure pr…
In this paper, we present a three-step methodological framework, including location identification, bias modification, and out-of-sample validation, so as to promote human mobility analysis with social media data. More specifically, we propose ways of identifying personal activity-specific places and commuting patterns in Beijing, China, based on Weibo (China's Twitter) check-in records, as well as modifying sample bias of check-in data with population synthesis technique. An independent citywide travel logistic survey is used as the benchmark for validating the results. Obvious differences ar…
The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users. Surprisingly, while there are variations in human movement in different cities, our analysis shows that those ar…
In this work we analyze the architecture of real urban mobility networks from the multiplex perspective. In particular, based on empirical data about the mobility patterns in the cities of Bogotá and Medell\'ın, each city is represented by six multiplex networks, each one representing the origin-destination trips performed by a subset of the population corresponding to a particular socioeconomic status. The nodes of each multiplex are the different urban locations whereas links represent the existence of a trip from one node (origin) to another (destination). On the other hand, the different l…
Understanding the drivers of urban mobility is vital for epidemiology, urban planning, and communication networks. Human movements have so far been studied by observing people's positions in a given space and time, though most recent models only implicitly account for expected costs and returns for movements. This paper explores the explicit impact of cost and network topology on mobility dynamics, using data from 2 city-wide public bicycle share systems in the USA. User mobility is characterized through the distribution of trip durations, while network topology is characterized through the pa…
The use of public transportation or simply moving about in streets are gendered issues. Women and girls often engage in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips in order to do household chores, work, and study ('trip chaining'). Women-headed households are often more prominent in urban settings and they tend to work more in low-paid/informal jobs than men, with limited access to transportation subsidies. Here we present recent results on urban mobility from a gendered perspective by uniquely combining a wide range of datasets, including commercial sources of telecom and open data. We explored urban mob…
We perform a systematic analysis on the large-scale taxi trip data to uncover urban mobility and city dynamics in multimodal urban transportation environments. As a case study, we use the taxi origin-destination trip data and some additional data sources in Washington DC area. We first study basic characteristics of taxi trips, then focus on five important aspects. Three of them concern urban mobility, which are respectively mobility and cost including effect of traffic congestion, trip safety, and multimodal connectivity; the other two pertain to city dynamics, which are respectively transpor…
Since the industrial revolution, accelerated urban growth has overflown administrative divisions, merged cities into large built extensions, and blurred the boundaries between urban and rural land-uses. These traits, present in most of contemporary metropolis, complicate the definition of cities, a crucial issue considering that objective and comparable metrics are the basic inputs needed for the planning and design of sustainable urban environments. In this context, city definitions that respond to administrative or political criteria usually overlook human dynamics, a key factor that could h…
Many of our routines and activities are linked to our ability to move; be it commuting to work, shopping for groceries, or meeting friends. Yet, factors that limit the individuals' ability to fully realise their mobility needs will ultimately affect the opportunities they can have access to (e.g., cultural activities, professional interactions). One important aspect frequently overlooked in human mobility studies is how gender-centred issues can amplify other sources of mobility disadvantages (e.g., socioeconomic inequalities), unevenly affecting the pool of opportunities men and women have ac…
People's daily activities in the urban environment are complex and vary by individuals. Existing studies using mobile phone data revealed distinct and recurrent transitional activity patterns, known as mobility motifs, in people's daily lives. However, the limitation in using only a few inferred activity types hinders our ability to examine general patterns in detail. We proposed a mobility network approach with geographic context-aware Twitter data to investigate granular daily activity patterns in the urban environment. We first utilized publicly accessible geo-located tweets to track the mo…
India has one of the highest levels of gender inequality in the world. Work participation rate of women is among the lowest with a wide gender gap. There are seclusion norms that restrict mobility of women outside home. However, transport literature in India has not explored the impact of this lack of autonomy on gender differences in travel demand. I use 2019 population-representative nationwide time-use survey of India. The dataset reported both travel and non-travel activities in 30-minute episodes over a 24-hour period. For urban residents, I analysed gender differences in trip rates and m…
A fundamental problem of interest to policy makers, urban planners, and other stakeholders involved in urban development projects is assessing the impact of planning and construction activities on mobility flows. This is a challenging task due to the different spatial, temporal, social, and economic factors influencing urban mobility flows. These flows, along with the influencing factors, can be modelled as attributed graphs with both node and edge features characterising locations in a city and the various types of relationships between them. In this paper, we address the problem of assessing…
This study leverages mobile phone data to analyze human mobility patterns in developing countries, especially in comparison to more industrialized countries. Developing regions, such as the Ivory Coast, are marked by a number of factors that may influence mobility, such as less infrastructural coverage and maturity, less economic resources and stability, and in some cases, more cultural and language-based diversity. By comparing mobile phone data collected from the Ivory Coast to similar data collected in Portugal, we are able to highlight both qualitative and quantitative differences in mobil…
