A comparative analysis of intra-city human mobility by taxi

Wenjun Wang, Lin Pan, Ning Yuan, Sen Zhang and Dong Liu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2015, vol. 420, issue C, 134-147

Abstract: Quantitative understanding of human movement behaviors would provide helpful insights into the mechanisms of many socioeconomic phenomena. In this paper, we investigate human mobility patterns through analyzing taxi-trace datasets collected from five metropolitan cities in two countries. We focus on three statistics for each dataset: the displacement of each occupied trip, the duration of each occupied trip, and the time interval between successive occupied trips by the same taxi (interevent time). The results indicate that the displacement distributions of human travel by taxi tend to follow exponential laws in two displacement ranges rather than power laws; the trip duration distributions can be approximated by log-normal distributions; the interevent time distributions can be well characterized by log-normal bodies followed by power law tails. For each considered measure, the rescaled distributions of all cities collapsed into a master curve. These results provide empirical evidence supporting the common regularity of intra-city human mobility. Moreover, we show that airport locations could play a role in explaining the spikes of displacement distributions of taxi trips in certain cities.

Keywords: Human mobility; Urban traffic; Taxi trajectory; Exponential distribution; Log-normal distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437114009406
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:420:y:2015:i:c:p:134-147

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.10.085

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().