Chapter 13 - A Back-Engineering Approach to Explore Human Mobility Patterns Across Megacities Using Online Traffic Maps

Abstract

The understanding of human motion along with the relationship between urban forms and flow has been a vivid research topic along years, considering its importance in many fields as traffic management and urban planning. The last decades, the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) enabled the individual human mobility monitoring by providing thousands of records with people's trajectories. This new source of information such as mobile phone data, smart card data, floating car data, and web-based sources services that create digital records enabled researchers to better understand the governing laws in human mobility. This chapter utilizes an alternative source of data, namely traffic information, broadcasted by online traffic maps to explore spatiotemporal mobility patterns at the city scale. Online traffic maps facilitate the collection of the vast amount of extremely detailed mobility data in real time that is aggregated for the sake of readability. The extraction of this aggregated information using image processing techniques enables to perform discretization of the urban space in seamless pixels, capturing the traffic state in each pixel based on the color code in a suitable data structure valuable for metaanalysis and patterns interpretation. Results are provided for six cities with different network structures and traffic characteristics, revealing regularities and useful insights regarding the temporal and spatial dimension of the urban mobility patterns.