Understanding the urban mobility community by taxi travel trajectory

Abstract

With the increase of urban population and the expansion of urban scale, understanding the urban structure could provide intellectual support for urban planning, traffic congestion, and even the spread of diseases. Little research has addressed the relationship between urban structure and human mobility. In this study, the community division method is applied to the itinerary network generated by taxi trajectory data, and the itinerary network is divided into several modules (called urban mobility communities). Our results suggest that the urban mobility community has different associated characteristics with travel distance and administrative area. When the travel distance increases, many adjacent communities gradually merge into large ones in the central area, while the communities remain similar in the suburban area. Moreover, we observed some communities around some pivotal roads are distributed as ribbons. The quantitative analysis of community division results demonstrates a phase transition between urban mobility community and travel distance. In particular, inspired by heterogeneous travel distance distribution and community boundary restrictions, we first construct a model that reflects the non-trivial relationship between urban mobility community and travel distance and reveals the phase transition between them. Our study represents the first attempt to prove that human mobility and urban structure can be reflected by each other.