Urban streets profiling with coupled spatio-temporal characteristics and topological information from the biking perspective

Abstract

Urban street profiling is the spatio-temporal pattern discovery of street-level urban areas, which plays a vital role in understanding urban structures and dynamics. Due to the natural topology and various geographic characteristics on the streets, it is necessary to combine multi-dimensional spatio-temporal information to understand different profiles of streets. This research aims to develop a street profiling framework according to the coupled characteristics of streets. At the start, a bidirected dual graph and a spatial weighted graph embedding method were used to solve the street representation. Then, the street profiles can be extracted by clustering embedding vectors of streets and feature importance analysis. As the case study, we employed the bike trajectories and street view images in Xiamen, China to depict the geographic attributes of streets. The results can reveal nine spatio-temporal street profiles from the biking perspective, including three spatial distribution patterns and two spatial semantic patterns. Urban streets in the study area show a significant hierarchical pattern because of locations and the spatial lags of the biking behaviors. Meanwhile, the spatio-temporal characteristics of biking behaviors are the main factors of street profiles, though the street environment attributes participate in over half the number of profile types. We further evaluated the profiling ability of the proposed framework and the importance of urban street profiles using coupled characteristics. Overall, this study explored the profiling method for coupling static and dynamic characteristics of urban streets. The profiling results also help understand street usage and experiences by bikers, which have a practical value on the human-oriented classification of streets and further urban development from a geographic view.