Segregated travel patterns within cities

Abstract

Social Networks People within cities are often segregated by race and class. To find out if segregation is limited to where people reside or if it extends to movements outside of their homes, Wang et al. analyzed 650 million geocoded tweets from 400,000 residents of America's 50 most populous cities to track their travel patterns. They found that people who live in primarily black or Hispanic neighborhoods, regardless of income, were less likely to travel to white or middle-class neighborhoods, even more so than residents of poor white neighborhoods. This relationship held even though all groups travel approximately the same distance during their day to the same number of neighborhoods. These data have implications for understanding the breadth of racial segregation within cities. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 , 7735 (2018).