Understanding Urban Mobility Pattern with Cellular Phone Data: A Case Study of Residents and Travelers in Nanjing

Fan Yang, Zhenxing Yao, Fan Ding, Huachun Tan and Bin Ran
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Fan Yang: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Urban ITS, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
Zhenxing Yao: School of Highway, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, China
Fan Ding: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Urban ITS, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
Huachun Tan: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Urban ITS, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
Bin Ran: Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Urban ITS, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 19, 1-17

Abstract: The rapid development of urban metropolises has attracted a growing number of immigrants and travelers, increasing the burden on transportation systems. Previous research on urban mobility patterns have ignored the temporal variations and heterogeneity in divergent urban trip makers due to the limited data resolution and coverage. In this paper, we analyzed cellular phone data of more than five million travelers for one month in Nanjing, China and proposed a method to extract trip origin and destination information from cellular phone signal data. We found that mobility patterns are different for urban residents, short-term travelers, and transfer travelers, and that trip length distributions can best be described by gamma and exponential distributions. In addition to the daily trip length distribution models, we utilized the agglomerative hieratical clustering method in order to group similar hourly trip patterns and further proposed within-day trip length distribution models under different times of the day and days of the week.

Keywords: cellular phone data; mobility pattern; trip length distribution; urban transportation planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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