Abstract
The rapid development of urban metropolises has attracted a growing number of immigrants and travelers, increasing the burden on transportation systems. Previous research on urban mobility patterns have ignored the temporal variations and heterogeneity in divergent urban trip makers due to the limited data resolution and coverage. In this paper, we analyzed cellular phone data of more than five million travelers for one month in Nanjing, China and proposed a method to extract trip origin and destination information from cellular phone signal data. We found that mobility patterns are different for urban residents, short-term travelers, and transfer travelers, and that trip length distributions can best be described by gamma and exponential distributions. In addition to the daily trip length distribution models, we utilized the agglomerative hieratical clustering method in order to group similar hourly trip patterns and further proposed within-day trip length distribution models under different times of the day and days of the week.
Highlights
Understanding urban mobility patterns is essential in transportation engineering, such as the estimation of trip distributions in the transportation planning procedures, and traffic forecasting in traffic management
This paper explores trip length distribution functions for heterogeneous population groups utilizing cellphone signaling data at a large-scale (5 million individuals)
We investigated the feasibility of using four models, including the exponential model, the Weibull model, the Rayleigh model, and the gamma model, in modeling the daily trip length distributions for heterogeneous population groups
Summary
Understanding urban mobility patterns is essential in transportation engineering, such as the estimation of trip distributions in the transportation planning procedures, and traffic forecasting in traffic management. Traditional urban mobility information acquisition relies on urban residents’ travel surveys. Methods such as questionnaires and telephone inquiries are used to obtain travel information such as travel destinations, travel time, and travel modes. The accuracy of the self-reported travel times and distances has raised serious questions. The participants of the surveys are mostly residents of the city and travelers are often neglected from those kinds of surveys. These travelers contribute a huge number of trips, especially in large metropolitan areas
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
