Influence of residential built environment on human mobility in Xining: A mobile phone data perspective

Abstract

The emergence of large-scale spatiotemporal trajectory data offers an excellent opportunity to characterize collective human mobility patterns and their relationship with the urban built environment. Such an approach can generate a complementary understanding of traditional individual travel behavior based on travel survey data. Using mobile phone data, this study aims to investigate how residential built environments affect residents’ mobility at an aggregated level. Specifically, three indicators (movement distance, activity space, and the number of stops) were derived from raw mobile phone data to characterize human mobility. The decay coefficients and average values were then employed to reveal the aggregated characteristics of movement distance, activity space, and the number of stops. Furthermore, linear regression was applied to examine the relationship between human mobility indicators and residential built environments. The results indicate that the living-built environment could better explain the activity space than the movement distance and number of stops. In addition, some differences in the relationship between human mobility and residential built environments are identified between weekdays and weekends. These findings could provide new insights into human mobility and its interaction with the built environment, thus advancing our understanding of human travel behavior from both individual and collective perspectives.