Estimation of urban zonal speed dynamics from user-activity-dependent positioning data and regional paths

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the digitalization of services and infrastructures has led to the emergence of a broad set of new information sources to characterize human mobility. These sources usually offer valuable significant population penetration rates but may also suffer from important temporal sparsity. Data generated by user activity, such as social networks or mobile phone data, especially fit this description. Although this temporal sparsity might prevent estimating individual travel speeds, we state that such low-frequency positioning data enable estimating the average urban traffic speed dynamics when considering an adequate network partitioning. In this sense, this article proposes a new method, based on the division of the urban area of a given city into regions and on the analysis of a limited set of basic characteristics of individual vehicle trips, such as the regional path. Our solution first involves estimating robust travel times from travelers sharing similar trip features and then jointly analyzing these travel times to deduce the underlying regional traffic speeds, using regression analysis. We apply this methodology on a set of trips derived from a large GPS dataset of vehicle tracks covering the city of Lyon. These data are purposely downsampled to reduce the sampling rate and reproduce bias and temporal features that are proper to sparser but larger-scale, mobility data sources dependent on user’s communication activities. Controlling the data downsampling process allows us to evaluate the impacts of the progressive information loss on the speed estimation, while the raw GPS data provide the ground truth speed reference against which to compare our results. Provided that the amount of observed individual trips is sufficient, the analysis returns satisfying speed estimation results, both at low and high downsampling levels. Thus, we successfully demonstrate that it is possible to estimate zonal traffic speeds from degraded trip data without evaluating individual travel speeds.