Understanding the Intra-urban Residents’ Trip Characteristics Based on GPS

Abstract

Quantitative studying the characteristics of Intra-urban residents’ trip would provide helpful insights into urban human activity and optimizes the urban transportation networks. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of Intra-urban patterns through analyzing approximately 600 thousand taxi trips extracted from seven consecutive days in Lanzhou, which is a typical valley city in West China. We focus on three statistics: pick-up point, drop-off point and trip distances. The pick-up point and the drop-off point are extracted based on grid cells and taxi trajectory O-D matrix. The distributions of city hotspots and trip distances are investigated. The selected statistical distributions are fitted to trip distances and the parameters are estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test suggests that the trip distances distribution follows a lognormal distribution.