Assessing the resilience of a road network is instrumental to improve existing infrastructures and design new ones. Here we apply the optimal path crack model (OPC) to investigate the mobility of road networks and propose a new proxy for resilience of urban mobility. In contrast to static approaches, the OPC accounts for the dynamics of rerouting as a response to traffic jams. Precisely, one simulates a sequence of failures (cracks) at the most vulnerable segments of the optimal origin-destination paths that are capable to collapse the system. Our results with synthetic and real road networks reveal that their levels of disorder, fractions of unidirectional segments and spatial correlations can drastically affect the vulnerability to traffic congestion. By applying the OPC to downtown Boston and Manhattan, we found that Boston is significantly more vulnerable than Manhattan. This is compatible with the fact that Boston heads the list of American metropolitan areas with the highest average time waste in traffic. Moreover, our analysis discloses that the origin of this difference comes from the intrinsic spatial correlations of each road network. Finally, we argue that, due to their global influence, the most important cracks identified with OPC can be used to pinpoint potential small rerouting and structural changes in road networks that are capable to substantially improve urban mobility.
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…
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…
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）
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…
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…
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 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）
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…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Universidad Carlos III de Madrid（马德里卡洛斯三世大学）
Urbanization and its problems require an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of urban dynamics, especially the complex and diversified lifestyles in modern cities. Digitally acquired data can accurately capture complex human activity, but it lacks the interpretability of demographic data. In this paper, we study a privacy-enhanced dataset of the mobility visitation patterns of 1.2 million people to 1.1 million places in 11 metro areas in the U.S. to detect the latent mobility behaviors and lifestyles in the largest American cities. Despite the considerable complexity of mobility visitatio…
Use of mobile phone sensing data to estimate residence and mobility times in urban patches during the COVID-19 epidemic: The case of the 2020 outbreak in Hermosillo, Mexico
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…
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））
