Exploring Spatial-Temporal Patterns of Urban Human Mobility Hotspots

Xiping Yang,Shiwei Lu,Zhiyuan Zhao

doi:10.3390/su8070674

Abstract

Understanding human mobility patterns provides us with knowledge about human mobility in an urban context, which plays a critical role in urban planning, traffic management and the spread of disease. Recently, the availability of large-scale human-sensing datasets enables us to analyze human mobility patterns and the relationships between humans and their living environments on an unprecedented spatial and temporal scale to improve decision-making regarding the quality of life of citizens. This study aims to characterize the urban spatial-temporal dynamic from the perspective of human mobility hotspots by using mobile phone location data. We propose a workflow to identify human convergent and dispersive hotspots that represent the status of human mobility in local areas and group these hotspots into different classes according to clustering their temporal signatures. To illustrate our proposed approach, a case study of Shenzhen, China, has been conducted. Six typical spatial-temporal patterns in the city are identified and discussed by combining the spatial distribution of these identified patterns with urban functional areas. The findings enable us to understand the human dynamics in a different area of the city, which can serve as a reference for urban planning and traffic management.

Highlights

Rapid urbanization motivates a large number of people to immigrate to cities from the countryside within a short period of time, which can cause urban problems: traffic congestion, the shortage of resources and environmental degradation [1,2]
An imbalance of work-home in urban local areas would lead to traffic congestion, which can cause air pollution due to automobile exhaust emissions an understanding of human mobility patterns plays an important role in solving these urban problems
The availability of large-scale people tracking datasets provides the opportunity and challenge to study urban human mobility patterns to better understand the interactions between human mobility and urban environments

Summary

Introduction

Rapid urbanization motivates a large number of people to immigrate to cities from the countryside within a short period of time, which can cause urban problems: traffic congestion, the shortage of resources and environmental degradation [1,2]. An imbalance of work-home in urban local areas would lead to traffic congestion, which can cause air pollution due to automobile exhaust emissions an understanding of human mobility patterns plays an important role in solving these urban problems It can help urban agencies understand the underlying driving forces of people in cities and to develop a better city for urban humanity by planning efficient urban transportation systems, optimizing environmentally-friendly function areas and allocating resources. Due to the rapid development and widespread use of location-aware devices, the collection of large-scale human sensor datasets, such as mobile phone data, taxi trajectories, smart card data and social media check-in data, has been improved [4,5,6] These datasets can track long-term human movements, encompass a large number of people and sense the real-time dynamics of urban citizens. The study of human mobility is flourishing and has attracted substantial attention in different research communities, including physics [7], geographical information science [8], transportation research [9,10], urban geography [11,12], urban planning [13] and epidemiology [14]

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Discussion

Conclusion